string to list? possible?

[Roy Smith]

aahz at panix.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:

> >i need to convert a string like "[1, 2, 3, 4]" to a list [1, 2, 3, 4].
> >possible?
> 
> >>> eval("[1, 2, 3, 4]")
> [1, 2, 3, 4]
> 
> The problem is that there's no error checking, and if you're accepting
> input from a possibly-hostile source, it could muck with your program or
> data files.

You can solve both of those problems with:

l = []
for s in x[1:-1].split(','):
    l.append (int (s))

It's a bit ugly, but does the job.