How do I turn this unicode into a dict?

Question

Sorry, I completely neglected to mention that I'm using Python. Let me try this again.

I'm using Python to consume a web service that returns the following JSON:

{
  "results" : [
    {
      "paramName" : "output",
      "dataType" : "GPString",
      "value" : "{'city': 'Falls Church', 'isRuralArea': False, 'zip': '22046', 'isNotInBTOPLMArea': True, 'longitude': '-77.186180', 'isGeocodable': True, 'county': u'Falls Church', 'isNotInBIPLMArea': True, 'state': 'VA', 'isLatLongInUSBounds': True, 'address': '604 Jackson St', 'latitude': '38.884937'}"
    }
  ],
  "messages" : [

  ]
}

Here are the important snippets from my fetching/parsing code:

import urllib
import httplib2
import json
import simplejson
http = httplib2.Http()

headers, response = http.request(url, 'GET')    

if headers['status'] == "200":

    responseAsJson = simplejson.loads(response)

    print "response = " + repr(responseAsJson)
    results = responseAsJson['results'][0]['value']

Unfortunately, this leaves me with the following value for results (as reported in PyScripter Debugger's Variables window):

u"{'city': 'Falls Church', 'isRuralArea': False, 'zip': '22046', 'isNotInBTOPLMArea': True, 'longitude': '-77.186180', 'isGeocodable': True, 'county': u'Falls Church', 'isNotInBIPLMArea': True, 'state': 'VA', 'isLatLongInUSBounds': True, 'address': '604 Jackson St', 'latitude': '38.884937'}"

I don't know how to then access the address or city keys, for instance.

Can you tell what I'm doing wrong, and how to fix it?

Thanks, Jamie

---

Old version of my question (obsolete):

Here's the JSON I'm parsing:

response = {u'messages': [], u'results': [{u'dataType': u'GPString', u'value': u"{'city': 'Falls Church', 'isRuralArea': False, 'zip': '22046', 'isNotInBTOPLMArea': True, 'longitude': '-77.186180', 'isGeocodable': True, 'county': u'Falls Church', 'isNotInBIPLMArea': True, 'state': 'VA', 'isLatLongInUSBounds': True, 'address': '604 Jackson St', 'latitude': '38.884937'}", u'paramName': u'output'}]}

I've drilled down to this node, and its type is "unicode." How do I make a dict out of this? I think the fact that it's unicode is preventing me from creating the dict or accessing its keys, but I'm not sure.

u"{'city': 'Falls Church', 'isRuralArea': False, 'zip': '22046', 'isNotInBTOPLMArea': True, 'longitude': '-77.186180', 'isGeocodable': True, 'county': u'Falls Church', 'isNotInBIPLMArea': True, 'state': 'VA', 'isLatLongInUSBounds': True, 'address': '604 Jackson St', 'latitude': '38.884937'}"

Thanks, Jamie

Answer 1

Since your results object looks like a string/unicode version of a dict, you need to eval it. A safe way of doing this (as of Python 2.6) would be to use the ast.literal_eval function:

results = ast.literal_eval(responseAsJson['results'][0]['value'])