Question

I’m trying to send urlencode() data to my web server.
The data used for the urlencode() function is read from a text file located on my local machine.
When I read the input data for the urlencode() function from the .py script no error is being thrown.
However, if the input data for the urlencode() function is comming from a local input text file I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “active_directory_ssl_test.py”, line 30, in
params = urllib.urlencode(dict(LINE))
ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is required

I’m doing the following:

FILE=open(IN_FILE, 'r')
LINE = FILE.readline()
while LINE:
    print LINE
    LINE = FILE.readline()
    params = urllib.urlencode(dict(LINE))
    try:
        f_handler = urlopen('https://host_name/path_name/file_name', params)

Why is there a difference, an error, when reading data from a text file. In both cases a variable is used as a parameter to the urlencode() function.

This is the content of the input text file:

{'hostname' : 'host.1.com', 'port' : '389', 'basedn' : 'CN=Users,DC=prem,DC=local', 'username' : 'CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=onprem,DC=local', 'password' : 'passwd', 'roupname' : 'CN=Group,CN=Users,DC=onprem,DC=local', 'attribute' : 'name', 'enabled' : 'sync', 'impsync' : 'sync', 'enabled' : 'enabled', 'username' : '[e-mail]', 'password' : 'passwd', 'update' ; 'update'}

Answer 1

I’ll go ahead and post my comment as an answer, as it is the answer. You’re calling dict() on a string. The dict() function expects one of two types of input. Either A. a list of tuples that form (key, value) pairs, or B. keyword arguments that come in the form key = value. You’re not passing either of those.

— Extra detail for the Comments —

>>> input = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
>>> type(input)
<type 'dict'>
>>> dict(input)
{'key2': 'value2', 'key1': 'value1'}
>>> input = "{'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}" # This is your 2nd form.
>>> type(input)
<type 'str'>
>>> dict(input)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is required

Also, for what it’s worth, in your first example the call to dict() is superfluous. You already have a dictionary which was declared using literal syntax.