error when remove a whitespace before a variable in python

Question

I would like to build a variable body1 use variable url1 in python 2.7

url1 = "http://somewebpage"

and body1 ={'url':url1} give me a whitespace after the colon,

{'url': 'http://somewebpage'}

but when I use

body1 ={'url:{}'.format(url1)}

or

body1 ={'url'+':'+str(url1)}

to remove the space, it gives

set(['url:http://somewebpage'])

as the wrong output, how to avoid to be a set? what I want is just

{'url':'http://somewebpage'}

there should no space after colon.

Answer 1

body1 = { 'url:{}'.format(url1) }

You are creating a string through format , then implicitly creating a set with the {} notation, which is syntactic sugar for the explicit set() .

body1 = { 'url': url1 }

The {} notation, when used with : , implicitly creates a dictionary instead of a set, which is printed to you (for visualization purposes) as {'url': 'http://somewebpage'} when you do print(body1) .

You are mistaking the dictionary string representation for the string that you want to generate. You don't want to generate any data structures. You just want to format a string that by chance looks like Python's printed representation of a dictionary.

Here is what you want: body1 = "{'url':'" + url1 + "'}"

I might add, that the use case seems a bit strange to me. OP, if you're trying to create a JSON string, Python has functionality in the json module to convert a dictionary to a JSON string with json.dumps({'url': 'http://somewebpage'}) .