Question

My goal is to convert a string into a dictionary. Here’s how it looks like:

[exploit] => 1
[hits] => 1
[completed] => 1
[is_malware] => 1
[summary] => 26.0@13965: suspicious.warning: object contains JavaScript
76.0@14467: suspicious.obfuscation using eval
76.0@14467: suspicious.obfuscation using String.fromCharCode

[severity] => 4
[engine] => 60

So I’ve tried several ways to do this, first attempt was to split at \n, but I encountered the problem that for [summary], the contents are split so that didn’t work. Then my second attempt was split at => however I encountered the problem that once I split at => it won’t know that it has to split at \n for the next key. Essentially it should look like this in the end
{ exploit:1, hits:1, completed:1….} so on so forth

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use re.findall to parse the text:

>>> import re
>>> re.findall('\[([^]]+)\] => (.*?)(?=\n\[|$)', s, re.S)
[('exploit', '1'), ('hits', '1'), ('completed', '1'), ('is_malware', '1'), ('summary', '26.0@13965: suspicious.warning: object contains JavaScript\n76.0@14467: suspicious.obfuscation using eval\n76.0@14467: suspicious.obfuscation using String.fromCharCode\n'), ('severity', '4'), ('engine', '60')]

You can put these values into a dictionary by calling dict.

>>> dict(re.findall('\[([^]]+)\] => (.*?)(?=\n\[|$)', s, re.S))
{'engine': '60', 'hits': '1', 'severity': '4', 'is_malware': '1', 'summary': '26.0@13965: suspicious.warning: object contains JavaScript\n76.0@14467: suspicious.obfuscation using eval\n76.0@14467: suspicious.obfuscation using String.fromCharCode\n', 'exploit': '1', 'completed': '1'}