Iterate through parts of a string

Question

I have string in the form

[3339:1.6101369,1062:1.5,5751:1.5,6376:1.5,  ...  ]

I want to iterate through the comma separated key-value pairs. What is the best or shortest way to do this?

score 11 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 14 '11 at 22:22

11

s = "[3339:1.6101369,1062:1.5,5751:1.5,6376:1.5]"
s = s.strip("[]")    # Drop the brackets
for kv in s.split(","):
    key, value = kv.split(":")
    print key, value

Alternatively, you could convert this into a dictionary (after stripping the brackets):

d = dict(kv.split(":") for kv in s.split(","))

and then iterate over the dictionary:

for key in d:
    print key, d[key]

answered Feb 14 '11 at 22:22

Sven Marnach

574,206
118
941
841

Make sure the OP is okay with not preserving key-value order with the dict approach. – PaulMcG Feb 15 '11 at 03:59

Mark Byers · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-14T22:39:41.373

4

d = ast.literal_eval('{' + s[1:-1] + '}')

edited Feb 14 '11 at 22:39

answered Feb 14 '11 at 22:23

Mark Byers

811,555
193
1,581
1,452

Clever idea. You'll need to call `.iteritems()` though. – Feb 14 '11 at 22:24
What if the ... in that string is }; commands.getoutput("rm -rf /"); { – Swiss Feb 14 '11 at 22:27
4

@Swiss: ast.literal_eval only evals literals. – Fred Nurk Feb 14 '11 at 22:29
if you need to preserve the order of the elements, you can use `d = ast.literal_eval('OrderedDict({' + s[1:-1] + '})')` with the addition of the import `from collections import OrderedDict` – Felipe Nardi Batista Aug 31 '17 at 14:11

Iterate through parts of a string

2 Answers2