On Mar 17, 6:56 am, Dan Bishop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mar 17, 1:15 am, Girish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I have a string a = "['xyz', 'abc']".. I would like to convert it to a > > list with elements 'xyz' and 'abc'. Is there any simple solution for > > this?? > > Thanks for the help... > > eval(a) will do the job, but you have to be very careful about using > that function. An alternative is > > [s.strip('\'"') for s in a.strip('[]').split(', ')]
This will fall over if xyz or abc include any of the characters your stripping/splitting on (e.g if xyz is actually "To be or not to be, that is the question"). Unless you can guarantee they won't, you'll need to write (or rather use) a parser that understands the syntax. Iain -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list