reading dictionary's (key,value) from file

[Jeffrey Froman]

ankitks.mital at gmail.com wrote:

> so this is what my option files look like:
> 
> 1opt.txt
> { '-cc': '12',
> '-I': r'/my/path/work/'}

You can turn these strings read from text files into actual dictionaries
using eval:

>>> d = eval("{ '-cc': '12', '-I': r'/my/path/work/'}")
>>> d
{'-I': '/my/path/work/', '-cc': '12'}
>>> type(d)
<type 'dict'>

Note that eval will happily execute all sorts of arbitrary code, so this is
not a good solution if you don't fully trust your option file creators.

It's also a bit clunky compared to simply importing. Since you already have
dictionary-literal syntax in your text file, why not add a
left-hand-operator and make it a module instead? For example:

# opt1.py
d = { '-cc': '12',
'-I': r'/my/path/work/'}

# main.py
from opt1 import d


--
Jeffrey