String to Dictionary in Python

Question

So I've spent way to much time on this, and it seems to me like it should be a simple fix. I'm trying to use Facebook's Authentication to register users on my site, and I'm trying to do it server side. I've gotten to the point where I get my access token, and when I go to:

https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=MY_ACCESS_TOKEN

I get the information I'm looking for as a string that's like this:

{"id":"123456789","name":"John Doe","first_name":"John","last_name":"Doe","link":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jdoe","gender":"male","email":"jdoe\u0040gmail.com","timezone":-7,"locale":"en_US","verified":true,"updated_time":"2011-01-12T02:43:35+0000"}

It seems like I should just be able to use dict(string) on this but I'm getting this error:

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

So I tried using Pickle, but got this error:

KeyError: '{'

I tried using django.serializers to de-serialize it but had similar results. Any thoughts? I feel like the answer has to be simple, and I'm just being stupid. Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

This data is JSON! You can deserialize it using the built-in json module if you're on Python 2.6+, otherwise you can use the excellent third-party simplejson module.

import json    # or `import simplejson as json` if on Python < 2.6

json_string = u'{ "id":"123456789", ... }'
obj = json.loads(json_string)    # obj now contains a dict of the data