Yes, "eval" of data from a file is rather risky. Suppose someone gave you a file containing somewhere in the middle: ... 22,44,66,88,"asd,asd","23,43,55" os.system('rm -rf *') 33,47,66,88,"bsd,bsd","23,99,88" ...
This would delete all the files in your directory! The csv module mentioned above is the tool of choice for this task, especially if there are strings that could contain quotes or commas. Doing this right is not at all easy. If you really want to roll your own, and the data is KNOWN to be fixed and very restricted, you can do something like: "myfile" contains: 13,2,'the rain',2.33 14,2,'in spain',2.34 for l in open('myfile'): x,y,comment,height = l.split(',') x=int(x) y=int(y) height=int(height) comment=comment.strip("' ") # strip spaces and quotes from front and back but beware this will break if the comment contains commas. -- George -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list