Be careful, though - make sure you can absolutely trust your source of data before calling eval on it.
If an unauthorised person could forseeably modify your file, then they could insert a string containing arbitrary Python code into it in place of your list, and then running your program would cause that code to be executed. So, to put it bluntly, eval is dangerous. Sure is convenient, though :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
