Convert string representation of list to list in Python

Question

I have a string that looks identical to a list, let's say:

'[万福广场西,凰花苑]'

I would like to convert it into something like this:

['万福广场西','凰花苑']

I used eval() and ast.literal_eval() but got error as following:

y=eval('[万福广场西,凰花苑]')


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-117-0aadbead218c> in <module>()
----> 1 y=eval('[万福广场西,凰花苑]')

<string> in <module>()

NameError: name '万福广场西' is not defined

when using ast.literal_eval(), I got this error ValueError: malformed node or string: <_ast.Name object at 0x000002A67FFA5CC0>

You got malformed node or string because it does NOT look identical to a list, it only look similar. — Stephen Rauch
– Stephen Rauch ♦, Commented Aug 2, 2018 at 8:43
print( '[万福广场西,凰花苑]'.strip("[]").split(",") ) ? — Rakesh
– Rakesh, Commented Aug 2, 2018 at 8:45

Pawan Singh · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-02 08:44:30Z

2

Try Something like

my_list = '[万福广场西,凰花苑]'[1:-1].split(",")

It will return you an list -- ['万福广场西', '凰花苑']

You can check it as -- type(my_list) #<class 'list'>

answered Aug 2, 2018 at 8:44

Pawan Singh

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Sunitha · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-02 08:47:47Z

2

Use strip and split

>>> '[万福广场西,凰花苑]'.strip('[]').split(",")
['万福广场西', '凰花苑']

answered Aug 2, 2018 at 8:47

Sunitha

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SanthoshSolomon · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-02 08:57:41Z

1

eval() will consider the given string as python code and return the result. So as per your string, the python code will something like this [万福广场西,凰花苑] which means two variable 万福广场西 and 凰花苑 are in a list.

If you want it to be evaluated as a list of strings you need to bound both strings with double quotes (") such as

'["万福广场西","凰花苑"]'.

When you subject this string to eval(), the output would be,

['万福广场西', '凰花苑']

If you want this to happen dynamically, you need to use split and join functions like,

''.join(list('[万福广场西,凰花苑]')[1:-1]).split(',')

which first makes the list of strings given by

list('[万福广场西,凰花苑]')[1:-1] # O/P ['万', '福', '广', '场', '西', ',', '凰', '花', '苑']

then joins all the strings as

''.join(['万', '福', '广', '场', '西', ',', '凰', '花', '苑']) # O/P 万福广场西,凰花苑

and splits the string by comma (,) to create your desired output.

'万福广场西,凰花苑'.split(',') # O/P ['万福广场西', '凰花苑']

Hope you have got what you were searching for. Feel free to comment in case of any clarifications required.

answered Aug 2, 2018 at 8:57

SanthoshSolomon

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1 Comment

SanthoshSolomon Over a year ago

@Sidhom Welcome!

blhsing · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-02 08:45:42Z

1

The content of your string isn't actually a valid list of literals because the literals are lacking the necessary quotes, so you can't parse it with eval() or ast.literal_eval().

Instead, you can use regular expression to parse the string into a list:

import re
print(re.findall(r'[^\[\],]+', '[万福广场西,凰花苑]'))

This outputs:

['万福广场西', '凰花苑']

answered Aug 2, 2018 at 8:45

blhsing

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