parsing a dictionary from a string

[Benjamin Georgi]

Hello list,

I could use some help extracting the keys/values of a list of 
dictionaries from a string that is just the str() representation of the 
list (the problem is related to some flat file format I'm using for file 
IO).

Example:
 >>> s = str(dict_list)
 >>> s
'[{0: [2], 1: []}, {0: [], 1: [], 2: []}, {0: [1, 2]}]'

Then, what I want to do is to reconstruct dict_list given s.
Now, one possible solution would be

 >>> dict_list = eval(s)

but since the content of s cannot be blindly trusted I`d rather not do 
it that way. Basically my question is whether there is another solution 
which is simpler than using regular expressions.

Best,
Benjamin