how to deserialize a python printed dictionary?

deserialization, dictionary, python

Solution

Use `ast.literal_eval()` and for such cases prefer `repr()` over `str()`, as `str()` doesn't guarantee that the string can be converted back to useful object.

In [7]: import ast

In [10]: dic = {u'key-a':u'val-a', "key-b":"val-b"}

In [11]: strs = repr(dic)

In [12]: strs
Out[12]: "{'key-b': 'val-b', u'key-a': u'val-a'}"

In [13]: ast.literal_eval(strs)
Out[13]: {u'key-a': u'val-a', 'key-b': 'val-b'}

Problem

I have python's str dictionary representations in a database as varchars, and I want to retrieve the original python dictionaries How to have a dictionary again, based in the str representation of a dictionay? Example ``` >>> dic = {u'key-a':u'val-a', "key-b":"val-b"} >>> dicstr = str(dic) >>> dicstr "{'key-b': 'val-b', u'key-a': u'val-a'}" ``` In the example would be turning dicstr back into a usable python dictionary.

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