Opening list from text file in python

Question

I have a text file which looks something like this:

["someString",1234,True],["anotherString",5678,False]

I am trying to convert the content of the file to a list, like this:

[["someString",1234,True],["anotherString",5678,False]]

So I tried to do this with the following lines:

test = open('file.txt','r')
test = test.read()

But this converts it to a string, like this:

'["someString",1234,True],["anotherString",5678,False]'

How can I convert this to a list?

meowgoesthedog · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-02 16:27:52Z

1

Wrap the string in brackets and use ast.literal_eval to parse it:

>>> from ast import literal_eval

>>> testString = '["someString",1234,True],["anotherString",5678,False]'

>>> literal_eval("[" + testString + "]")
[['someString', 1234, True], ['anotherString', 5678, False]]

answered Apr 2, 2019 at 16:27

meowgoesthedog

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2 Comments

Vlad Over a year ago

Do you know why json.loads('[' + testString + ']') fails?

meowgoesthedog Over a year ago

@Vlad False is not a JSON keyword; false is however.

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