How to convert a list with key value pairs to dictionary

I am assuming that your order is always the same, i.e., in groups of 4. The idea is to split the strings using : and then create key/value pairs and use nested for loops. The .strip() is to get rid of whitespace

lst = ['name: test1', 'email: [email protected]', 'role: test', 'description: test', 
       'name: test2', 'email: [email protected]', 'role: test2', 'description: test2', 
       'name: test3', 'email: [email protected]', 'role: test3', 'description: test3']

answer = []

for i in range(0, len(lst), 4):
    dic = {}
    for j in lst[i:i+4]:
        dic[j.split(':')[0]] = j.split(':')[1].strip() 
    answer.append(dic)

# [{'name': 'test1',  'email': '[email protected]',  'role': 'test',  'description': 'test'},
    #  {'name': 'test2',  'email': '[email protected]',  'role': 'test2',  'description': 'test2'},
    #  {'name': 'test3',  'email': '[email protected]',  'role': 'test3',  'description': 'test3'}]

A list comprehension would look like

answer = [{j.split(':')[0]:j.split(':')[1].strip() for j in lst[i:i+4]} for i in range(0, len(lst), 4)]

Without having to know the number of keys each dict has in advance, you can iterate through the list, split each string into a key and a value by ': ', appending a new dict to the list if the key is already in the last dict, and keep adding the value to the last dict by the key:

output = []
for key_value in lst:
    key, value = key_value.split(': ', 1)
    if not output or key in output[-1]:
        output.append({})
    output[-1][key] = value

so that given your sample list stored in lst, output would become:

[{'name': 'test1',
  'email': '[email protected]',
  'role': 'test',
  'description': 'test'},
 {'name': 'test2',
  'email': '[email protected]',
  'role': 'test2',
  'description': 'test2'},
 {'name': 'test3',
  'email': '[email protected]',
  'role': 'test3',
  'description': 'test3'}]