typecasting: a string object to a dictionary object

[midtoad]

dont bother wrote:

> I have a string:
> 
> feature_vector. It is of the form
> <index: value, index: value, index: value>
> 
> I want to make this string into a dictionary so that I
> can apply .keys() method

okay, here's a solution, assuming that your < and > are part of the string.
If not, remove the line where you take a slice.   I'm sure that there are
more Pythonic solutions, but this works...

---
import string

# define a test string
s1 = "<name1: value1, name2: value2, name3: value3>"
# get rid of the < and > by taking a slice
s1 = s1[1:-1]
# split string at the commas
s2 = string.split(s1,',')
mydict = {}
for item in s2:
        a,b = string.split(item,":")
        mydict[a] = b
        print mydict[a]
print "Dictionary is: ", mydict
---

cheers
Stewart