Question

I’ve found how to split a delimited string into key:value pairs in a dictionary elsewhere, but I have an incoming string that also includes two parameters that amount to dictionaries themselves: parameters with one or three key:value pairs inside:

clientid=b59694bf-c7c1-4a3a-8cd5-6dad69f4abb0&keyid=987654321&userdata=ip:192.168.10.10,deviceid:1234,optdata:75BCD15&md=AMT-Cam:avatar&playbackmode=st&ver=6&sessionid=&mk=PC&junketid=1342177342&version=6.7.8.9012

Obviously these are dummy parameters to obfuscate proprietary code, here. I’d like to dump all this into a dictionary with the userdata and md keys’ values being dictionaries themselves:

requestdict {'clientid' : 'b59694bf-c7c1-4a3a-8cd5-6dad69f4abb0', 'keyid' : '987654321', 'userdata' : {'ip' : '192.168.10.10', 'deviceid' : '1234', 'optdata' : '75BCD15'}, 'md' : {'Cam' : 'avatar'}, 'playbackmode' : 'st', 'ver' : '6', 'sessionid' : '', 'mk' : 'PC', 'junketid' : '1342177342', 'version' : '6.7.8.9012'}

Can I take the slick two-level delimitation parsing command that I’ve found:

requestDict = dict(line.split('=') for line in clientRequest.split('&'))

and add a third level to it to handle & preserve the 2nd-level dictionaries? What would the syntax be? If not, I suppose I’ll have to split by & and then check & handle splits that contain : but even then I can’t figure out the syntax. Can someone help? Thanks!

Answer 1

I basically took Kyle’s answer and made it more future-friendly:

def dictelem(input):   
    parts   = input.split('&')
    listing = [part.split('=') for part in parts]

    result = {}
    for entry in listing:
        head, tail = entry[0], ''.join(entry[1:])
        if ':' in tail:
            entries = tail.split(',')
            result.update({ head : dict(e.split(':') for e in entries) })
        else:
            result.update({head: tail})

    return result