How to Convert Bytes Type to Dictionary [Duplicate]

Question

I have a bytes type object like this:

b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"

I need to get the dictionary from that using python code. I am converting it into string and then converting into dictionary as follows.

string = dictn.decode("utf-8")
print(type(string))
>> <class 'str'>
d = dict(toks.split(":") for toks in string.split(",") if toks)

But I am getting the below error:

------> d = dict(toks.split(":") for toks in string.split(",") if toks)
TypeError: 'bytes' object is not callable

Accepted Answer

I think a decode is also required to get a proper dict.

a= b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"
ast.literal_eval(a.decode('utf-8'))
**Output:** {'one': 1, 'two': 2}

The accepted answer yields

a= b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"
ast.literal_eval(repr(a))
**output:**  b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"

The literal_eval hasn't done that properly with many of my codes so I personally prefer to use json module for this

import json
a= b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"
json.loads(a.decode('utf-8'))
**Output:** {'one': 1, 'two': 2}

Accepted Answer

All you need is ast.literal_eval. Nothing fancier than that. No reason to mess with JSON unless you are specifically using non-Python dict syntax in your string.

# python3
import ast
byte_str = b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"
dict_str = byte_str.decode("UTF-8")
mydata = ast.literal_eval(dict_str)
print(repr(mydata))

See answer here. It also details how ast.literal_eval is safer than eval.

Answer 3

You could try like this:

import json
import ast

a= b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}"
print(json.loads(a.decode("utf-8").replace("'",'"')))

print(ast.literal_eval(a.decode("utf-8")))

There are the doc of module:

1.ast doc

2.json doc

Answer 4

You can use Base64 library to convert string dictionary to bytes, and although you can convert bytes result to a dictionary using json library. Try this below sample code.

import base64
import json


input_dict = {'var1' : 0, 'var2' : 'some string', 'var1' : ['listitem1','listitem2',5]}

message = str(input_dict)
ascii_message = message.encode('ascii')
output_byte = base64.b64encode(ascii_message)

msg_bytes = base64.b64decode(output_byte)
ascii_msg = msg_bytes.decode('ascii')
# Json library convert stirng dictionary to real dictionary type.
# Double quotes is standard format for json
ascii_msg = ascii_msg.replace("'", "\"")
output_dict = json.loads(ascii_msg) # convert string dictionary to dict format

# Show the input and output
print("input_dict:", input_dict, type(input_dict))
print()
print("base64:", output_byte, type(output_byte))
print()
print("output_dict:", output_dict, type(output_dict))

Answer 5

Simple 😁

data = eval(b"{'one': 1, 'two': 2}")

How to Convert Bytes Type to Dictionary [Duplicate]

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5 Answers

James H. Sterling