On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Greg Lindstrom <gslindst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Is it possible to create a dictionary from a string value? Something along > these lines (but that works): > >>>> mystring = "{'name':'greg','hatsize':'7 5/8'}" >>>> mystring > "{'name':'greg','hatsize':'7 5/8'}" >>>> dict(mystring) > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "<string>", line 1, in <fragment> > ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is > required >>>> > > I would like to return an undetermined (at call time) number of fields from > a postgres database (only 1 record) for a given request. My thought is that > I could build a dictionary in the form of a string, return the string and > then convert the string value to a dictionary. I can do that now, but I > have to parse the string and then build the dictionary. Any thoughts or > help you could provide would be appreciated. > > --greg
building the dictionary as a string seems like a hacky thing to do and you might want to reevaluate your methods. But if everything in the dict is a literal, you can do ast.literal_eval. > > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list