reading a list from a file

[Rune Strand]

But iif it are many lists in the file and they're organised like this:

['a','b','c','d','e']
['a','b','c','d','e']
['A','B','C','D','E'] ['X','F','R','E','Q']

I think this'll do it

data = open('the_file', 'r').read().split(']')

lists = []
for el in data:
	el = el.replace('[', '').strip()
	el = el.replace("'", "")
	lists.append(el.split(','))

# further processing of lists

but the type problem is still to be resolved ;-)