Facilitate type conversions about cerberus HOT 3 CLOSED

Since you are doing two very different things (conversion, and then validation), I would definitely apply the 'separation of concerns' principle here. If the data coming in (the 'string') is supposed to be a dict, you could attempt a conversion with the ast.literal_eval builtin (Py2.6+).

literal_eval(node_or_string)
    Safely evaluate an expression node or a string containing a Python
    expression.  The string or node provided may only consist of the following
    Python literal structures: strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, booleans,
    and None.

I suspect it wouldn't be enough, thought, but it could be a good starting point. In Eve I am using simplejson/json loads method to obtain a dict out of query strings and request form data.

from cerberus.

Also, since you mention dates in JSON streams, did you check JSON-Datetime? It's a little toy of mine, built when I was experimenting with JSON and conversion issues. The Eve implementation is slightly different though.

from cerberus.

I think you are right and I should separate concerns. Thanks for the pointer to JSON-Datetime, I'll check it out.

from cerberus.