Question

I’m reading a file into python 2.4 that’s structured like this:

field1: 7
field2: "Hello, world!"
field3: 6.2

The idea is to parse it into a dictionary that takes fieldfoo as the key and whatever comes after the colon as the value.

I want to convert whatever is after the colon to it’s “actual” data type, that is, '7' should be converted to an int, "Hello, world!" to a string, etc. The only data types that need to be parsed are ints, floats and strings. Is there a function in the python standard library that would allow one to make this conversion easily?

The only things this should be used to parse were written by me, so (at least in this case) safety is not an issue.

Answer 1

For older python versions, like the one being asked, the eval function can be used but, to reduce evilness, a dict to be the global namespace should be used as second argument to avoid function calls.

>>> [eval(i, {"__builtins__":None}) for i in ['6.2', '"Hello, world!"', '7']]
[6.2, 'Hello, world!', 7]