Question

What would be the fastest way (execution wise) to to json.loads on this sort of input string:

istr=""" {u'topic': u'dl_job', u'url': u'http://somedomain.com' }"""

I don’t have much control over what is passed as istr.

NOTES:

• json.loads doesn’t like the leading u
• nor does it like strings being delimited by ' instead of "

Updated: I know I could play dirty tricks like replacing the u and ' but I was wondering if there is a cleaner solution.

Answer 1

If this is a Python data structure (as it looks like), the function you want is ast.literal_eval.

http://docs.python.org/library/ast#ast.literal_eval

This is similar to just calling eval, but literal_eval is safe, because it won’t call any functions or anything, just parse literals (i.e. lists, dicts, strings, numbers, etc.).