Question

Using django-social-auth to grab user data from facebook, it is returning a list of dicts in a unicode string. For example, response.get(‘education’) for a user is returning:

u”[{u’school’: {u’id’: u’12345′,
u’name’: u’Joe Thiesman High’},
u’type’: u’High School’}, {u’school’:
{u’id’: u’23456′, u’name’: u’Joe
Montana University’}, u’type’:
u’College’}]”

I want to convert this from a string to a list where I can extract the data, but am struggling. An answer to a similar question (String to Dictionary in Python) advised using:

foo=json.loads(string)

but that fails because its a list with nested dicts, 1 for each school, rather than just a dictionary, and it seems to be getting confused. the error im getting is:

ValueError: Extra Data: line 1 column 73 – line 1 column 144

Originally, I was getting a ValueError: Expecting Property Name: line 1, column 2, until I used string.replace() to exchange the ” with ‘, and vice-versa. That did get rid of that error, but I mention in case that wasn’t the correct solution.

Answer 1

Take a look at the answer to this question :

Convert a String representation of a Dictionary to a dictionary?

The use of python’s ast.literal_eval might be very useful to you. It is also a lot safer to use than eval because it only will evaluate python data literals (strings, tuples, etc…) but not executable code.

See ast.literal_eval in the python docs.