How to remove single quotes only from ends of Dictionary in Python

Question

I'm trying to take a dictionary:

{'company': 'BOOK TA .K (TAMAN DAYA) SDN BHD', 'date': '25/12/2018', 'address': 'NO.53 55,57 & 59, JALAN SAGU 18, TAMAN DAYA, 81100 JOHOR BAHRU, JOHOR.', 'total': '9.00'}

And try to remove quotes surrounding each key and value as follows (desired output):

{company:BOOK TA .K (TAMAN DAYA) SDN BHD, date:25/12/2018, address:NO.53 55,57 & 59, JALAN SAGU 18, TAMAN DAYA, 81100 JOHOR BAHRU, JOHOR., total:9.00}

The problem is that no matter which code I try (regex, strip, rstrip...), I end up snipping those single quotes that come in the middle (this is part of a large dataset and there are many cases in which the company and address fields have quotation marks as part of them ) I cannot lose these embedded single quotes , I must only get rid of those at the end. eg.

'Wendy's Stall' -> Wendy's Stall

is what I need,

NOT

'Wendy's Stall' -> Wendys Stall

I thought initially that this question is similar to what I need: Removing single quotes from a dictionary , but the problem is that they simply took integer representations of the value and got away with it as all values were numbers and not strings. Thanks a lot for your help!

Answer 1

If your dictionary is actually a dictionary and not just a string that looks like a dictionary, you can simply convert it into a string that looks like you want:

d = {'company': 'Wendy\'s Stall', 'date': '25/12/2018', 'address': 'NO.53 55,57 & 59, JALAN SAGU 18, TAMAN DAYA, 81100 JOHOR BAHRU, JOHOR.', 'total': '9.00'}
s = "{"+", ".join(["{}:{}".format(k,v) for k,v in d.items()])+"}"
print(s)

Output:

{company:Wendy's Stall, date:25/12/2018, address:NO.53 55,57 & 59, JALAN SAGU 18, TAMAN DAYA, 81100 JOHOR BAHRU, JOHOR., total:9.00}

Side note: If your "dictionary" is a string, you can try to convert it into an actual dict either using JSON (if it's valid JSON) or using AST.