[FIXED] How to convert string with dict into actual dict object?

Issue

I have a string output as this (its a string return from a Popen command):

p = Popen(ZOO_CMD, shell=True, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
output, err = p.communicate()
print output

the variable output prints:

{
  "animals": [
    {
      "animalCount": 1
    }
  ],
  "zooName": "zoo1"
}

I've tried to load the string as such

json_dict = json.loads(output)
print json_dict['animals']

I am getting this traceback

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./zoo_dump", line 44, in <module>
    json_dict = json.loads(output)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/json/__init__.py", line 307, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/json/decoder.py", line 319, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/json/decoder.py", line 338, in raw_decode
    raise ValueError("No JSON object could be decoded")
ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded

Any idea how to fix?

Solution

You try to make it valid JSON and then parse, but that will tend to be error prone unless you have very predictable json errors.

Instead, you could use ast.literal_eval to safely evaluate it into python:

import ast 

s = '''{
  "animals": [
    {
      "animalCount": 1,
    }
  ],
  "zooName": 'zoo1'
}'''

ast.literal_eval(s)

Result

{'animals': [{'animalCount': 1}], 'zooName': 'zoo1'}

Answered By - Mark