Best way to delimit a list?

[dannywebster at googlemail.com]

Hi - I have a list returned from popen/readlines, and am wondering how
to go about iterating over each item which was returned (rather than
currently having the whole lot returned).

so far:

>>> f=os.open("./get_hostnames").readlines

returns ['host1 host2 host3 ... hostN\n]'

i'd like to be in a position to iterate through these, grabbing each
host.  I have played with transmuting to a str, and using split, and
this works, but I get the subscript brackets from the list output as
expected, as the list output is now a string literal, and this is not
what I want - and I think it's a bit long-winded to do a search 'n
replace on it - hence why I ask in the subject what's the best way.

>>> f=str(f)
>>> f.split()
["['host1","host2", ... ,"hostN\n']"]


Any help is highly appreciated

ta

dan.