Split string into dictionary with space delimiter

Question

I have a Python string like this

query = 'name:Thoong company:"Big Company, LLC" age:25'

I want convert it to a dictionary with key and value split by ':'

{
    'name': 'Thoong',
    'age': 25,
    'company': 'Big Company, LLC',
}

I tried to split by ' ' and then ':' . but seems the query.split(' ') not work because we have ' ' "Big Company, LLC"

Is there any way to archive this, could be using a regular expression?

Answer 1

Use shlex :

import shlex

dict(i.split(":") for i in shlex.split(query))

Output:

{'age': '25', 'company': 'Big Company, LLC', 'name': 'Thoong'}

Answer 2

Use regex and insert into a dictionary:

import re

regex_1 = r"(\w+:\w+)"
regex_2 = r"(\w+:\"\w+\s\w+,\s\w+\")"
query = 'name:Thoong company:"Big Company, LLC" age:25'
r_1 = re.findall(regex_1, query)
r_2 = re.search(regex_2, query).group(1)
d = {*r_1,
     r_2}

print(d)

Returning:

{'name:Thoong', 'age:25', 'company:"Big Company, LLC"'}

Answer 3

How about this one? This looks not elegant but you can easily understand what this code does.

query = 'name:Thoong company:"Big Company, LLC" age:25'
tmp = query.split(":")
keys = []
values = []

# extract keys
for t in tmp:
    _t = t.split(" ")
    if len(_t) == 1:
        keys.append(_t[0])
    else:
        values.append(" ".join(_t[:-1]))
        keys.append(t.split(" ")[-1])

values.append(keys[-1])
del keys[-1]
result = {k: v for k, v in zip(keys, values)}
print(result)

Answer 4

Splitting on blanks ( ) and other signs probably won't work as names may contain any number of characters.

If the query always consists of these three elements, you could try splitting at the keywords:

d = {'name': query.split('name:')[1].split(' company:')[0],
     'company': query.split('company:')[1].split(' age:')[0],
     'age': query.split('age:')[1]}

If the query is ill formatted, though, this will not work. There, you might have to try to parse it and escape the blanks and colons that occur within quotation marks.