Turning string with embedded brackets into a dictionary

Question

What's the best way to build a dictionary from a string like the one below:

"{key1 value1} {key2 value2} {key3 {value with spaces}}"

So the key is always a string with no spaces but the value is either a string or a string in curly brackets (it has spaces)?

How would you dict it into:

{'key1': 'value1',   'key2': 'value2',   'key3': 'value with spaces'}

Answer 1

import re
x="{key1 value1} {key2 value2} {key3 {value with spaces}}"
print dict(re.findall(r"\{(\S+)\s+\{*(.*?)\}+",x))

You can try this.

Output:

{'key3': 'value with spaces', 'key2': 'value2', 'key1': 'value1'}

Here with re.findall we extract key and its value.re.findall returns a list with tuples of all key,value pairs.Using dict on list of tuples provides the final answer. Read more here.

Answer 2

I can´t make it more elegantly:

input = "{key1 value1} {key2 value2} {key3 {value with spaces}}"
x = input.split("} {")             # creates list with keys and values
y = [i.split(" {") for i in y]     # separates the list-values from keys
# create final list with separated keys and values, removing brackets
z = [[i.translate(None,"{").translate(None,"}").split() for i in j] for j in y]

fin = {}
for i in z:
    fin[i[0][0]] = i[-1]

It´s very hacky, but it should do the job.