Regular expression to match comma separated list of key=value where value can contain commas

Question

I have a naive \"parser\" that simply does something like:
[x.split(\'=\') for x in mystring.split(\',\')]

However mystring can be something like<

Answer 1

Could I suggest that you use the split operations as before. But split at the equals first, then splitting at the rightmost comma, to make a single list of left and right strings.

input =
"bob=whatever,king=kong,banana=herb,good,yellow,thorn=hurts"

will at first split become

first_split = input.split("=")
#first_split = ['bob' 'whatever,king' 'kong,banana' 'herb,good,yellow,thorn' 'hurts']

then splitting at rightmost comma gives you:

second_split = [single_word for sublist in first_split for item in sublist.rsplit(",",1)]
#second_split = ['bob' 'whatever' 'king' 'kong' 'banana' 'herb,good,yellow' 'thorn' 'hurts']

then you just gather the pairs like this:

pairs = dict(zip(second_split[::2],second_split[1::2]))