Read the written list of dictionaries from file in Python

Question

I have a file which is a list of dictionaries in this way:

[{\'text\': \'this is the text\', \'filed1\': \'something1\', \'filed2\': \'something2\', \'subtexts

Answer 1

If json has failed but you know that this is valid, you could try:

random_string = "{'a':'1', 'b':'2', 'c':['3', '4']}"
intended_output = eval(random_string)

print intended_output['c'][0]

Answer 2

Use ast.literal_eval which is a safe way of evaluating Python literals (as opposed to eval) into actual data structures.

That is:

import ast

with open('file.txt') as f:
    data = ast.literal_eval(f.read())

If you have something beyond the supported types (strings, bytes, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, sets, booleans, and None), you can use my recipe in this answer.