How to take string format and turn it into a dictionary

Question

I have a format of a string like this:

{'ind': 'a', 'system': 'x'}

and I would like to turn it into a dictionary, how do I do so?

the string does not seem to be in valid json format, this is a task I was given in my university — JakeLong, Dec 12 '22 at 16:47
This is the string representation of a python object. This is NOT JSON. — Nineteendo, Dec 12 '22 at 16:48
Something like [`ast.literal_eval`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html#ast.literal_eval) should work. — Axe319, Dec 12 '22 at 16:50

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 12 '22 at 16:50

Turning that string into JSON is easy enough, with .replace().

import json, pprint

s = "{'ind': 'a', 'system': 'x'}"
d = json.loads(s.replace("'", '"'))
assert isinstance(d, dict)
pprint.pp(d, width=1)

produces

{'ind': 'a',
 'system': 'x'}

For more general cases, you may wish to rely on ast.parse or literal_eval.

1 Answers1