Dictionary from String?

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Greg Lindstrom <gslindstrom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to create a dictionary from a string value?  Something along
> these lines (but that works):
>
>>>> mystring = "{'name':'greg','hatsize':'7 5/8'}"
>>>> mystring
> "{'name':'greg','hatsize':'7 5/8'}"
>>>> dict(mystring)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<string>", line 1, in <fragment>
> ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is
> required
>>>>
>
> I would like to return an undetermined (at call time) number of fields from
> a postgres database (only 1 record) for a given request.  My thought is that
> I could build a dictionary in the form of a string, return the string and
> then convert the string value to a dictionary.  I can do that now, but I
> have to parse the string and then build the dictionary.  Any thoughts or
> help you could provide would be appreciated.
>
> --greg

building the dictionary as a string seems like a hacky thing to do and
you might want to reevaluate your methods. But if everything in the
dict is a literal, you can do ast.literal_eval.

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