Interpreting Strings as Other Data Types in Python

Question

I'm reading a file into python 2.4 that's structured like this:

field1: 7
field2: "Hello, world!"
field3: 6.2

The idea is to parse it into a dictionary that takes fieldfoo as the key and whatever comes after the colon as the value.

I want to convert whatever is after the colon to it's "actual" data type, that is, '7' should be converted to an int, "Hello, world!" to a string, etc. The only data types that need to be parsed are ints, floats and strings. Is there a function in the python standard library that would allow one to make this conversion easily?

The only things this should be used to parse were written by me, so (at least in this case) safety is not an issue.

Answer 1

Since the "only data types that need to be parsed are int, float and str", maybe somthing like this will work for you:

entries = {'field1': '7', 'field2': "Hello, world!", 'field3': '6.2'}

for k,v in entries.items():
    if v.isdecimal():
        conv = int(v)
    else:
        try:
            conv = float(v)
        except ValueError:
            conv = v
    entries[k] = conv

print(entries)
# {'field2': 'Hello, world!', 'field3': 6.2, 'field1': 7}