I have a string:
s= "[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]"
and I need to convert that string into a list:
l= [7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]
the problem is, when I use list(s) I get this:
['[', '7', ',', ' ', '9', ',', ' ', '4', '1', ',', ' ', '[', '3', '2', ',', ' ', '6', '7', ']', ']']
I am using python 3.2
You can do exactly what you asked for by using ast.literal_eval():
>>> ast.literal_eval("[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]")
[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]
However, you probably want to use a sane serialisation format like JSON in the first place, instead of relying on the string representation of Python objects. (As a side note, the string you have might even be JSON, since the JSON representation of this particular object would look identical to the Python string representation. Since you did not mention JSON, I'm assuming this is not what you used to get this string.)
json and pickle modules, to name two.Use the ast module, it has a handy .literal_eval() function:
import ast
l = ast.literal_eval(s)
On the python prompt:
>>> import ast
>>> s= "[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]"
>>> ast.literal_eval(s)
[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]
You want to use ast.literal_eval:
import ast
s= "[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]"
print ast.literal_eval(s)
# [7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]
Use: package ast: function : literal_eval(node_or_string)
It is another answer, But I don't suggest you.Because exec is dangerous.
>>> s= "[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]"
>>> try:
... exec 'l = ' + s
... l
... except Exception as e:
... e
[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]
why not use eval()?
>>> s = "[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]"
>>> eval(s)
[7, 9, 41, [32, 67]]
listan iterable, it will give you a list containing the entries from the iterable.