Creating a dictionary from a string

To solve your example you can do this:

mydict = dict((k.strip(), v.strip()) for k,v in 
              (item.split('-') for item in s.split(',')))

It does 3 things:

• split the string into "<key> - <value>" parts: s.split(',')
• split each part into "<key> ", " <value>" pairs: item.split('-')
• remove the whitespace from each pair: (k.strip(), v.strip())

>>> s = 'A - 13, B - 14, C - 29, M - 99'
>>> dict(e.split(' - ') for e in s.split(','))
{'A': '13', 'C': '29', 'B': '14', 'M': '99'}

EDIT: The next solution is for when you want the values as integers, which I think is what you want.

>>> dict((k, int(v)) for k, v in (e.split(' - ') for e in s.split(',')))
{'A': 13, ' B': 14, ' M': 99, ' C': 29}