reading a list from a file

[Konstantin Veretennicov]

On 6/20/05, David Bear <david.bear at asu.edu> wrote:
> I have a file that contains lists -- python lists. sadly, these
> are not pickled. These are lists that were made using
> a simple print list statement.

Sad, indeed. But what kind of objects they held? Only ints? Ints and
strings? Arbitrary objects?

> 
> Is there an easy way to read this file into a list again?
> I'm thinking I would have to
> 
> read until char = '['
>    read until char = " ' "
> 
> Well, reading character by char until I have the list and then
> parse it all myself.

At least you can leave tokenizing to python lib:

>>> import tokenize, token, pprint
>>> token_names = dict([
...     (value, name) for (name, value)
...     in token.__dict__.iteritems()
...     if isinstance(value, int)])
>>> tokens = tokenize.generate_tokens(
...     iter(['[1, 2, "ab\'c,d"]']).next)
>>> pprint.pprint([(token_names[t[0]], t[1]) for t in tokens])
[('OP', '['),
 ('NUMBER', '1'),
 ('OP', ','),
 ('NUMBER', '2'),
 ('OP', ','),
 ('STRING', '"ab\'c,d"'),
 ('OP', ']')]

- kv