BartC <b...@freeuk.com>: > Of course this doesn't help you parsing typical input which uses > commas as separators, not terminators!
That's a red herring. You mustn't parse with eval(). You shouldn't event think of parsing non-Python data with eval(). Why should Python's syntax resemble a CSV file? Try compiling the data file with a C compiler or bash. The real answer is to do: "a,b,c".split(",") ==> ['a', 'b', 'c'] Now, tuples would be trivial: tuple("a,b,c".split(",")) ==> ('a', 'b', 'c') but a tuple is probably not what you'd want here since the number of data elements in the OP's question is not constant. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list