String To List

[Jeff Schwab]

Girish wrote:
> I have a string a = "['xyz', 'abc']".. I would like to convert it to a
> list with elements 'xyz' and 'abc'. Is there any simple solution for
> this??

Do you want:

(1) Specifically to vivify lists formatted as in your example?  If so, why?

(2) To save and restore arbitrary python objects?

(3) To define some kind of configuration file format that you can read 
from Python?