Converting string to dict? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Serialization

What you are talking about doing is object serialization, and there are better ways of doing it than rolling your own serialization method (though you seem to have come up with YAML). Both of these are still less secure than the ast.literal_eval() approach (pickle particularly), but they definitely should be noted here.

JSON

Here is an example of doing what you want using JSON, a popular cross-language format:

import json

myDict = {'a':1, 'b':2}

# write to the file 'data'
with open('data','w') as f:
    json.dump(myDict, f)

# now we can load it back
with open('data','r') as f:
    myDictLoaded = json.load(f)

print myDictLoaded

Output:

{u'a': 1, u'b': 2}

pickle

Here is a second example doing the same thing using pickle. pickle is more powerful in that it can serialize all* python objects, even ones you write.

import cPickle as pickle

myDict = {'a':1, 'b':2}

# write to the file 'data'
with open('data','w') as f:
    pickle.dump(myDict, f)

# now we can load it back
with open('data','r') as f:
    myDictLoaded = pickle.load(f)

print myDictLoaded

Output:

{'a': 1, 'b': 2}

Answer 2

You can use eval if you trust the input string.

>>> a=eval('{"a":1,"b":2}')
>>> a
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}

Answer 3

Try this, it's the safest way:

import ast
ast.literal_eval("{'x':1, 'y':2}")
=> {'y': 2, 'x': 1}

All the solutions based in eval() are dangerous, malicious code could be injected inside the string and get executed.

According to the documentation the expression gets evaluated safely. Also, according to the source code, literal_eval parses the string to a python AST (source tree), and returns only if it is a literal. The code is never executed, only parsed, so there is no reason for it to be a security risk.

Answer 4

This format is not JSON, but YAML, which you can parse with PyYAML:

>>> import yaml
>>> s = '{a: 1, b: 2}'
>>> d = yaml.load(s)
>>> d
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}
>>> type(d)
<type 'dict'>