Sometimes you may get an input that is a string, but you actually need it to be a list, or a list of lists.
There are many alternatives that you can use to convert such strings into lists, or list of lists, but in this article, I am going to mention here a really quick way.
You don’t need to learn regular expressions, or spend many hours trying to consider the edge cases. You can simply use a method included in the module called ast.
Let us illustrate it with some quick examples.
Let’s say that you get an input in a function that is a string, but it is supposed to be a list:
You don’t need it in that format. You need it to be a list:
Or maybe you the following response from an API call:
Rather than bothering with complicated regular expressions, all you have to do is import the module ast and then call its method literal_eval:
That’s all you need to do.
Now you will get the result as a list, or list of lists, namely like the following:
That’s it. I hope you find this useful.
