How To Convert A List Within A String To A List

I have a dict where some of the values are lists. Unfortunately, Python thinks they are strings. The dict looks like this: dict = {'key': 'x', 'key1': '[1, 2, 3], ...'} When I pul

Solution 1:

You can use the ast library to convert strings of code into actual python code.

ast.literal_eval(''.join(list(dict['key1'])))

e.g.

>>>import ast>>>_list = ['[', '1', ','' ', '2', ',', ' ', '3', ']']>>>ast.literal_eval(''.join(_list))
[1, 2, 3]

Update

As ast.literal_eval is 2.6 and onward, see this post about backporting literal_eval to 2.5