Question

Say I have a file called settings.py and it’s content is the following:

{
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": True,
    "word_wrap": "true",
    "font_face": "Monaco",
    "font_size": 14.0,
    "highlight_line": True,
    "ignored_packages":
    [
        ""
    ],
    "what": '''
            This is python file, not json
            '''
}

How can I get it into a dict called settings in my main app file app.py?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use ast.literal_eval() to do this safely.

import ast

data="""\
{
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": True,
    "word_wrap": "true",
    "font_face": "Monaco",
    "font_size": 14.0,
    "highlight_line": True,
    "ignored_packages":
    [
        ""
    ],
    "what": '''
            This is python file, not json
            '''
}\
"""

print(ast.literal_eval(data))

Giving us:

{'what': '\n            This is python file, not json\n            ', 'font_size': 14.0, 'translate_tabs_to_spaces': True, 'font_face': 'Monaco', 'word_wrap': 'true', 'highlight_line': True, 'ignored_packages': ['']}

Edit:

Given the new comment from the asker that suggests that he wants to be able to use ... in his config, ast.literal_eval() will not be suitable, as it can’t handle ellipses. It’s not quite clear if this is what he meant, and this is still a good answer to the question that was asked.

Turns out the asker was talking about triple quoted strings, which are handled by this correctly.