Question

I have a string s (note that the a and b are not enclosed in quotation marks, so it can’t directly be evaluated as a dict):

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

I want convert this variable to a dict like this:

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

How can I do this?

Answer 1

As your string is malformed as both json and Python dict so you neither can use json.loads not ast.literal_eval to directly convert the data.

In this particular case, you would have to manually translate it to a Python dictionary by having knowledge of the input data

>>> foo = '{a:1,b:2}'
>>> dict(e.split(":") for e in foo.translate(None,"{}").split(","))
{'a': '1', 'b': '2'}

As Updated by Tim, and my short-sightedness I missed the fact that the values should be integer, here is an alternate implementation

>>> {k: int(v) for e in foo.translate(None,"{}").split(",") 
     for k, v in [e.split(":")]}
{'a': 1, 'b': 2}