Efficient parsing of strings in Python

You can try casting all the data into a dict after removing all the unnecessary head and tail chars.

import re

line = 'unicode: {"Title":"The Fountain","Year":"2006","Rated":"R","Released":"22 Nov 2006","Genre":"Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi","Director":"Darren Aronofsky","Writer":"Darren Aronofsky, Darren Aronofsky","Actors":"Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Sean Patrick Thomas, Ellen Burstyn","Plot":"Spanning over one thousand years, and three parallel stories, The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world.","Poster":"http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTU5OTczMTcxMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDg3MTEzMw@@._V1_SX320.jpg","Runtime":"1 hr 36 mins","Rating":"7.4","Votes":"100139","ID":"tt0414993","Response":"True"}'

def parser(text):
    match = re.search(r'\{\"([^}]+)\"\}', text)
    if match:
        return dict(x.split('":"') for x in match.group(1).split('","'))

newdict = parser(line)

for k, v in newdict.items():
    print k, v

I employ regex, but it's just as easily substituted with any method that removes up to {" and after }" in the retrieved string.

Seems to me that everyone is working way too hard... if you really have

line = 'unicode: {"key1":"Value1", "key2","value2", etc...}'

Which looks like a string...

then you strip "unicode:" off the front of the string

newline = line[9:]

then eval the result directly into a dict

data_dict=eval(newline)

then you access the data by key

print(data_dict['Title'])

You have perfect formatting to create a Python dict and can access the values directly from that container.