I have a program which outputs a list in a .txt file on a server and I want to save that list in a new variable.
I'm doing:
with open ("file.txt", "r") as myfile:
data = myfile.read().replace('\n', '')
var = data
but obviously print(var) returns a string "[list, of, stuff]"
Yeah I can bypass the txt-save procedure but what in case I could not?
you can use AST
import ast
var="[list, of, stuff]"
var=ast.literal_eval(var)
print var[0]
#output list
From docs
ast.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, bytes, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, sets, booleans, and None.
If you're original data was serialized using JSON then you could also use the json module from the Python standard library.
Even if it was just print(some_list) you could still use the json library; i.e:
>>> from json import dumps, loads
>>> xs = [1, 2, 3]
>>> loads(dumps(xs)) == loads(repr(xs))
True
