Clojure: convert a string to map

Question

Do you know a function that takes a Clojure string and converts it to a map. For example, if the function gets the string

:first "John" :last "Lukas" :city "London"

it returns a map with the previous key-value relations.

Answer 1

You can use the clojure.end/read-string function for this. It makes sure that nobody injects code to your system, but otherwise will parse clojure data structures. Prepend "{" and append "}" to make it a map, that can be parsed that way:

(def stringtoparse ":first \"John\" :last \"Lukas\" :city \"London\"") 

(clojure.edn/read-string (str "{" stringtoparse "}"))