Convert obejct string repr to actual object

[Carsten Haese]

On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 21:19 +0200, Tor Erik Sønvisen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've tried locating some code that can recreate an object from it's
> string representation...
> The object in question is really a dictionary containing other
> dictionaries, lists, unicode strings, floats, ints, None, and
> booleans.
> 
> I don't want to use eval, since I can't trust the source sending the
> object.

You could still use eval, but run a separate algorithm first to make
sure the string is "legal." For example, you could whip up a simple
PyParsing grammar to restrict the set of allowable strings, or compile
the string into byte code and inspect the byte code to look for red
flags like LOAD_NAME (with a name other than None) and CALL_FUNCTION.

HTH,

-- 
Carsten Haese
http://informixdb.sourceforge.net