How to split comma-separated key-value pairs with quoted commas

Question

I know there are a lot of other posts about parsing comma-separated values, but I couldn\'t find one that splits key-value pairs and handles quoted commas.

I have st

Answer 1

Ok, I actually figured out a pretty nifty way, which is to split on both comma and equal sign, then take 2 tokens at a time.

input_str = '''age=12,name=bob,hobbies="games,reading",phrase="I'm cool!"'''

lexer = shlex.shlex(input_str)
lexer.whitespace_split = True
lexer.whitespace = ',='

ret = {}
try:
  while True:
    key = next(lexer)
    value = next(lexer)

    # Remove surrounding quotes
    if len(value) >= 2 and (value[0] == value[-1] == '"' or
                            value[0] == value[-1] == '\''):
      value = value[1:-1]

    ret[key] = value

except StopIteration:
  # Somehow do error checking to see if you ended up with an extra token.
  pass

print ret

Then you get:

{
  'age': '12',
  'name': 'bob',
  'hobbies': 'games,reading',
  'phrase': "I'm cool!",
}

However, this doesn't check that you don't have weird stuff like: age,12=name,bob, but I'm ok with that in my use case.

EDIT: Handle both double-quotes and single-quotes.