Convert the string representation of a Python dictionary to JSON

You've got a Python dictionary that was printed to a log file. You want to run it through JSON tools, like jq but it's not actually JSON. This command line tool allows you to convert that file to JSON.

Why?

If you're the owner of a python script that writes simply does print(str(d)) you should consider changing it to use print(json.dumps(d)) instead. However, you're not always the owner of scripts you use and you can't always change the code. Instead, convert from the python string representation of a dictionary to JSON.

Examples

$ cat input.txt
{'example': {'number': 42, 'text': 'lorem ipsum', 'boolean': True}}

Let's convert it to JSON with:

$ cat input.txt | python3 -m pydict2json
{"example": {"number": 42, "text": "lorem ipsum", "boolean": true}}

That's hard to read, let's pretty print:

$ cat input.txt | python3 -m pydict2json --pretty
{
  "example": {
    "number": 42,
    "text": "lorem ipsum",
    "boolean": true
  }
}

Much better.

Now that it's JSON we can use all our favorite JSON tools like jq:

$ cat input.txt | python3 -m pydict2json | jq .example.number
42

The tool also supports input directly on the command line:

$ python3 -m pydict2json --literal "{'a': None}"
{"a": null}

and supports per-line processing to JSON Lines format:

$ python3 -m pydict2json --lines --input-file out.log
{"a": 1}
{"b": 2}
{"c": 3}