ConfigParser: writes a list but reads a string?

[Terry Carroll]

It looks like ConfigParser will accept a list to be writing to the
*.ini file; but when reading it back in, it treats it as a string.

Example:

###############################
import ConfigParser
def whatzit(thingname, thing):
   print thingname, "value:", thing
   print thingname, "length:", len(thing)
   print thingname, type(thing)

cfgfile = "cfgtest.ini"
config1 = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config1.add_section("test")

t1 = range(1,11)
config1.set("test", "testlist", t1)
outfile=open(cfgfile,"w")
config1.write(outfile)
outfile.close()

config2 = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config2.read(cfgfile)
t2 = config2.get("test","testlist")

whatzit("t1", t1)
whatzit("t2", t2)

###############################

Output is:

  t1 value: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
  t1 length: 10
  t1 <type 'list'>
  t2 value: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
  t2 length: 31
  t2 <type 'str'>

That is, t1 is a list of length 10, consisting of:
 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] 
and is written out; but t2 is read back in as a string 
 "[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]"
of length 31.

It took me a while to figure this out, since they looked identical in
print statements.

Is there a pythonic way to read in a list from a .INI file with
ConfigParser?  Is this expected behavior for ConfigParser?  I would
not expect this conversion; rather, an exception when trying to write
the list if the list is not supported.