turn key="value" string into a dict

Question

I have a string with the following format:

author="PersonsName" date="1183050420" format="1.1" version="1.2"

I want to turn it in to a Python dict, a la:

{'author': 'PersonsName', 'date': '1183050420', 'format': '1.1', 'version': '1.2'}

I have tried to do so using re.split on the string as so:

attribs = (re.split('(=?" ?)', twikiattribs))

thinking I would get a list back like:

['author', 'PersonsName', 'date', '1183050420', 'format', '1.1', 'version', '1.2']

that then I could turn into a dict, but instead I'm getting:

['author', '="', 'PersonsName', '" ', 'date', '="', '1183050420', '" ', 'format', '="', '1.1', '" ', 'version', '="', '1.2', '"', '']

So, before I follow the re.split line further, is there generally a better way to achieve what I'm trying to do, and/or if the solution involves re.split, how can I write a regex that will split on any of the strings =", "_ (where "_" is a space char) or just " to just yield a list with the keys in the odd indices, and values in the even?

Answer 1

Use re.findall():

dict(re.findall(r'(\w+)="([^"]+)"', twikiattribs))

re.findall(), when presented with a pattern with multiple capturing groups, returns a list of tuples, each nested tuple containing the captured groups. dict() happily takes that output and interprets each nested tuple as a key-value pair.

Demo:

>>> import re
>>> twikiattribs = 'author="PersonsName" date="1183050420" format="1.1" version="1.2"'
>>> re.findall(r'(\w+)="([^"]+)"', twikiattribs)
[('author', 'PersonsName'), ('date', '1183050420'), ('format', '1.1'), ('version', '1.2')]
>>> dict(re.findall(r'(\w+)="([^"]+)"', twikiattribs))
{'date': '1183050420', 'format': '1.1', 'version': '1.2', 'author': 'PersonsName'}

re.split() also behaves differently based on capturing groups; the text on which you split is included in the output if grouped. Compare the output with and without the capturing group:

>>> re.split('(=?" ?)', twikiattribs)
['author', '="', 'PersonsName', '" ', 'date', '="', '1183050420', '" ', 'format', '="', '1.1', '" ', 'version', '="', '1.2', '"', '']
>>> re.split('=?" ?', twikiattribs)
['author', 'PersonsName', 'date', '1183050420', 'format', '1.1', 'version', '1.2', '']

The re.findall() output is far easier to convert to a dictionary however.

Answer 2

you can also do it without re in one line:

>>> data = '''author="PersonsName" date="1183050420" format="1.1" version="1.2"'''
>>> {k:v.strip('"') for k,v in [i.split("=",1) for i in data.split(" ")]}
{'date': '1183050420', 'format': '1.1', 'version': '1.2', 'author': 'PersonsName'}

if whitespaces are allowed inside the values you can use this line:

>>> {k:v.strip('"') for k,v in [i.split("=",1) for i in data.split('" ')]}