I am trying to convert a string to a dictionary with dict function, like this
import json
p = "{'id':'12589456'}"
d = dict(p)
print d['id']
But I get the following error
ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is required
Why does it fail? How can I fix this?
What you have is a string, but dict function can only iterate over tuples (key-value pairs) to construct a dictionary. See the examples given in the dict's documentation.
In this particular case, you can use ast.literal_eval to convert the string to the corresponding dict object, like this
>>> p = "{'id':'12589456'}"
>>> from ast import literal_eval
>>> d = literal_eval(p)
>>> d['id']
'12589456'
Since p is a string containing JSON (ish), you have to load it first to get back a Python dictionary. Then you can access items within it:
p = '{"id":"12589456"}'
d = json.loads(p)
print d["id"]
However, note that the value in p is not actually JSON; JSON demands (and the Python json module enforces) that strings are quoted with double-quotes, not single quotes. I've updated it in my example here, but depending on where you got your example from, you might have more to do.
p is a string containing JSON (ish) - No it is not.json.loads will not work for you. It will work only with JSON strings. What you have is not a JSON string.