how to read list from file

[Harvey Greenberg]

On Saturday, October 5, 2013 7:24:39 PM UTC-6, Tim Chase wrote:
> On 2013-10-05 18:08, Harvey Greenberg wrote:
> 
> > I am looping as for L in file.readlines(), where file is csv.
> 
> > 
> 
> > L is a list of 3 items, eg, [{'a':1, 'b':2}, [1,2,3], 10] Note that
> 
> > the first item is a dir and 2nd is a list, so parsing with split
> 
> > doesn't work.  Is there a way to convert L, which is a string, to
> 
> > the list of 3 items I want?
> 
> 
> 
> sounds like you want ast.literal_eval():
> 
> 
> 
>   Python 2.7.3 (default, Jan  2 2013, 13:56:14) 
> 
>   [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2
> 
>   Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
> 
>   information.
> 
>   >>> s = "[{'a':1, 'b':2}, [1,2,3], 10]"
> 
>   >>> import ast
> 
>   >>> print repr(ast.literal_eval(s))
> 
>   [{'a': 1, 'b': 2}, [1, 2, 3], 10]
> 
> 
> 
> -tkc

that didn't work.  printing it looks like the list because it's the input, but try printing len(repr(ast.literal_eval(s))).  It should give 3, but it gives 72 (number of chars).