How do I turn a file's contents into a dictionary? - dictionary

Question

I have a function that I want to open .dat files with, to extract data from them, but the problem is I don't know how to turn that data back into a dictionary to store in a variable. Currently, the data in the files are stored like this: "{"x":0,"y":1}" (it uses up only one line of the file, which is just the normal structure of a dictionary).
Below is just the function where I open the .dat file and try to extract stuff from it.
def openData():
file = fd.askopenfile(filetypes=[("Data",".dat"),("All Files",".*")])
filepath = file.name
if file is None:
return
with open(filepath,"r") as f:
contents = dict(f.read())
print(contents["x"]) #let's say there is a key called "x" in that dictionary
This is the error that I get from it: (not because the key "x" is not in dict, trust me)
Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "...\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\tkinter\__init__.py", line 1892, in __call__
return self.func(*args)
File "...\PycharmProjects\[this project]\main.py", line 204, in openData
contents = dict(f.read())
ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is required
Process finished with exit code 0
Update: I tried using json and it worked, thanks to #match
def openData():
file = fd.askopenfile(filetypes=[("Data",".dat"),("All Files",".*")])
filepath = file.name
if file is None:
return
with open(filepath,"r") as f:
contents = dict(json.load(f))
print(contents["x"])

Answer 1

You need to parse the data to get a data structure from a string, fortunately, Python provides a function for safely parsing Python data structures: ast.literal_eval(). E.g:
import ast
...
with open("/path/to/file", "r") as data:
dictionary = ast.literal_eval(data.read())
Reference stackoverflow