python eval vs ast.literal_eval vs JSON decode

Question

I am converting 2 MB of data as a string into a dict. The input is serialized in JSON.

Anyways I am currently using ast.literal_eval and I get the dictionary I want, but then when I tried just running eval it seems to run faster, and also returns the same result.

Is there any reason to use the ast module or the json module when eval works just fine?

Answer 1

I don't really like this attitude on stackoverflow (and elsewhere) telling people without any context that what they are doing is insecure and they shouldn't do it. Maybe it's just a throwaway script to import some data, in that case why not choose the fastest or most convenient way?

In this case, however, json.loads is not only more secure, but also more than 4x faster (depending on your data).

In [1]: %timeit json.loads(data)
10000 loops, best of 3: 41.6 µs per loop

In [2]: %timeit eval(data)
10000 loops, best of 3: 194 µs per loop

In [3]: %timeit ast.literal_eval(data)
1000 loops, best of 3: 269 µs per loop

If you think about it makes sense json is a such more constrained language/format than python, so it must be faster to parse with an optimized parser.