Parsing strings into dicts

what is the best way of turning string = ‘a 1 b 3 c 4\n’ into a mapping type with a, b, c as their keys?

>>> x = 'a 1 b 2 c 3 d 4'

>>> z = iter(x.split())

>>> m = dict(zip(z,z))

>>> m

{'a': '1', 'c': '3', 'b': '2', 'd': '4'}

Thanks to sjj and deltab on #python Oh, and if you are using ints:

z = iter([int(i) for i in thisline.split()])