Converting a String into Dictionary python

I want to have a dictionary from ``` >>> page_detail_string = urllib2.urlopen("http://graph.facebook.com/Ideas4India").read() ``` It returns a string like ``` >>> page_detail_string '{"about":"Ideas for development of India","category":"Community","description":"Platform where you can discuss and share your ideas which you think might help in betterment of our country.\\nPlease respect other community members and do not talk politics here.","is_published":true,"talking_about_count":0,"username":"Ideas4India","were_here_count":0,"id":"250014455083430","name":"Ideas 4 India","link":"http:\\/\\/www.facebook.com\\/Ideas4India","likes":23}' ``` Now i want to convert it to dictionary which i can be easily done by using ast.literal_eval ``` >>> import ast >>> dict_page = ast.literal_eval(page_detail_string) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ast.py", line 80, in literal_eval return _convert(node_or_string) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ast.py", line 63, in _convert in zip(node.keys, node.values)) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ast.py", line 62, in <genexpr> return dict((_convert(k), _convert(v)) for k, v File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ast.py", line 79, in _convert raise ValueError('malformed string') ``` but I think it throws this error because of ``` "is_published":true ``` Is there any way i can convert it to dictionary by stripping above key and value ("is_published":true). Thanks