Reading key/value pairs from text file, line by line, and passing values/dict to urlopen http function

Question

I have to fill in multiple form fields on a web page
I got the http POST part completed so I can post data to the web page.
I also got the part completed where I create a dictionary of key/value pairs and have the form fields filled on the web page.

Key/value pairs:

input1 = {'hostname' : 'host', 'port' : '22', 'basedn' : 'CN=Users', 'bindusername' : 'admin', 'bindpassword' : 'passwd', 'groupname' : 'CN=Group,CN=Users,DC=tech,DC=com', 'usernameattribute' : 'name'}

for line in open("/Users/rwettstein/Scripts/Files/ldap-settings.txt", "r"):
    print line
    input = line
    time.sleep(10)

    params = urllib.urlencode(dict(input))

try:
    f_handler = urlopen('https://hostname/path/file.php', params)
    except urllib2.HTTPError, error:
        print "Error Code: %s" % error.code

However, if I place the key/value pair information into a text file and then read the data from the text file, read from the file line by line, encode it into a dictionary, and then hand it off to the Http Request, I get the following error:

ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is required

Is this error occurring because the value being passed from the file read function only returns one single argument?

Answer 1

This is because each line in your file is ONE string. You need a KEY, VALUE pair to update a dictionary. If you post a sample line from your file in your question, I can show you how split it into the required KEY and VALUE

EDIT: How to Split Lines from the text file

line = "{'hostname' : 'host', 'port' : '22', 'basedn' : 'CN=Users', 'bindusername' : 'admin', 'bindpassword' : 'passwd', 'groupname' : 'CN=Group,CN=Users,DC=tech,DC=com', 'usernameattribute' : 'name'}"

pairs = line[1:-1].replace("'", '').split(', ')
pairs = [pair.split(":") for pair in pairs]
for pair in pairs:
    pair = [i.strip() for i in pair]

pass_this_in = dict(pairs)

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Use ast.literal_eval to parse each line into a dict. I've modified your code a little to show how it's done.

import ast

input1 = {'hostname' : 'host', 'port' : '22', 'basedn' : 'CN=Users', 'bindusername' : 'admin', 'bindpassword' : 'passwd', 'groupname' : 'CN=Group,CN=Users,DC=tech,DC=com', 'usernameattribute' : 'name'}

for line in open("/Users/rwettstein/Scripts/Files/ldap-settings.txt", "r"):
    print line
    # this assumes each line has a dictionary literal in it.
    # you can add more robust processing (e.g. skipping empty lines
    # or lines starting with #)
    input = ast.literal_eval(line.strip())
    time.sleep(10)

    # this assumes input is a dict or a sequence of key/value tuples.
    params = urllib.urlencode(input)

try:
    f_handler = urlopen('https://hostname/path/file.php', params)
    except urllib2.HTTPError, error:
        print "Error Code: %s" % error.code