Accessing the list within a dictionary in Python

Question

I have created a dictionary

store = {'assetType': "['props','char','env','sets']", 'Height': '871', 'Project': 'AnimationProject1', 'Width': '2048', 'FPS': '24', 'Type': 'Animation', 'Unit': 'cm'}

This is within an xml file, so I use xml.etree.ElementTree to parse the file and find , findall and iter to access the xml files and the above line is what I got at the end. I use a for loop to access the xml file

import xml.etree.ElementTree as xml

read = xml.parse(xmlFile)
#xmlFile is the xmlFile directory

findBase = read.findall('base')
#'base' and 'type' are the xml.SubElement used in the xml file.

for child in findBase:
    findType = child.iter('type')
    store = child.attrib
    for types in findType:
        store[types.attrib.keys()[0]] = types.attrib.values()[0]
    print store
    print store.items()[0][1][3]

However, now I would like access 'props' from 'assetType' from the dictionary above. I tried using store.items()[0][1] and I'm able to get "['props','char','env','sets']" but when I do store.items()[0][1][3] , instead of getting the word sets , I get r instead. I understand the reason behind it, it's because it has registered that whole line as a string instead of a list of characters. I have also tried something like store.get("assetType") The problem is the same.

My question is, how can I get the word props , char , env or sets as a whole from the dictionary above instead of individual letters?

Thanks

Answer 1

The assetType value is a string as you mentioned that needs to be parsed into a list. A couple ways to do it as mentioned in the comments. Here's a simple JSON way that's unfortunately fairly specific to your case. The single quotes have are not valid JSON so they have to be swapped for doubles.

>>> import json
>>> store = {'assetType': "['props','char','env','sets']", 
 'Height': '871', 'Project': 'AnimationProject1', 
 'Width': '2048', 'FPS': '24', 'Type': 'Animation', 
 'Unit': 'cm'}
>>> json.loads(store['assetType'].replace("'",'"'))[3]
u'sets'

Answer 2

If you can trust the input you can do an eval on the string representation of your list to convert it into a proper Python list

store = {'assetType': "['props','char','env','sets']", 'Height': '871', 'Project': 'AnimationProject1', 'Width': '2048', 'FPS': '24', 'Type': 'Animation', 'Unit': 'cm'}
asset_types = eval(store['assetType'])
# Then access the entries in the list
print asset_types[0]  # etc.