Question

I have the following PHP string:

“{‘blah’:1178,’blah’:0,’blah’:260,’blah’:0,’needWrapper’:

{‘NEED’:’TEXTNEED’,’NEED’:’TEXTNEED’}, ‘blah’:’blah’}”

EDIT: I broke it up to hopefully make it more readable

I need to get the “NEED: TEXTNEED” and “NEED: TEXTNEED” substrings from that. I feel like there’s a good way to do that with regex’s or using explode or something but I can’t quite piece together an elegant/working solution. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

If you replace the single quotes with double quotes, it can be parsed with json:

import json

s = "{'blah':1178,'blah':0,'blah':260,'blah':0,'needWrapper':{'NEED':'TEXTNEED','NEED':'TEXTNEED'}, 'blah':'blah'}"

print json.loads(s.replace("'", '"'))
# {u'blah': u'blah', u'needWrapper': {u'NEED': u'TEXTNEED'}}

Now you can just access the objects.

If the source is coming from php, it should be able to produce valid JSON with double quoted objects:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php