what is the return type of a SOAP function call?

[Rajarshi Guha]

Hi,
  I have a registered SOAP function which puts some data into  a
dictionary and returns the dictionary. However when the client recieves
this result from the function call, the return value is a string,  - the
dict seems to be mangled.

IS there any way to ocnvert a string represenation of a dict to a dict?
Or is there some special way to use the return value from a SOAP func
call?

TIA,