By the way - all suggestions so far rely on chopping the last dictionary out as a string (naturally) and then using 'eval' to evaluate it.
This has the inherent security problem that embedded python code will also be run. This is not just a security risk (which may *not* be an issue) but might cause extremely unpredictable results - which will be I guess. Text might be evaluated as an expression. There already exists a small python module called ConstructParser by John Berninger that will read dictionaries from strings and reconstruct them without using eval. You'll still need to isolate the actual dictionary you want. Google for it, if you can't find it - email me and I'll send you a copy. It's nice and small..... If you want a script that will load and save dictionaries you could use ConfigObj. It uses the text format of 'ini' files ( keyword=value), but is very easy to use. http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/configobj.html Regards, Fuzzyman http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list