I just found out about this today while working on a Django app. I have some data stored in a database as a string but the structure is a dictionary and I wanted to retrieve it as a dictionary object.

Instead of parsing this data to retrieve the keys and values myself, it turned out Python has a module called ast (Abstract Syntax Trees) that can take care of this, specifically the literal_eval()function:

>>> import ast
>>> data = "{'user': 'bob', 'age': 10, 'grades': ['A', 'F', 'C']}"
>>> ast.literal_eval(data)
{'age': 10, 'grades': ['A', 'F', 'C'], 'user': 'bob'}
>>> user = ast.literal_eval(data)
>>> user['age']
10
>>> user['grades']
['A', 'F', 'C']
>>> user['user']
'bob'

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/988228/converting-a-string-to-dictionary