how to read list from file

[Harvey Greenberg]

On Sunday, October 6, 2013 10:41:33 AM UTC-6, Harvey Greenberg wrote:
> On Saturday, October 5, 2013 7:24:39 PM UTC-6, Tim Chase wrote:
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> > On 2013-10-05 18:08, Harvey Greenberg wrote:
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> > 
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> > > I am looping as for L in file.readlines(), where file is csv.
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> > > 
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> > > L is a list of 3 items, eg, [{'a':1, 'b':2}, [1,2,3], 10] Note that
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> > > the first item is a dir and 2nd is a list, so parsing with split
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> > > doesn't work.  Is there a way to convert L, which is a string, to
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> > > the list of 3 items I want?
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> > sounds like you want ast.literal_eval():
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> >   Python 2.7.3 (default, Jan  2 2013, 13:56:14) 
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> > 
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> >   [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2
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> > 
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> >   Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
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> > 
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> >   information.
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> > 
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> >   >>> s = "[{'a':1, 'b':2}, [1,2,3], 10]"
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> > 
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> >   >>> import ast
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> > 
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> >   >>> print repr(ast.literal_eval(s))
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> >   [{'a': 1, 'b': 2}, [1, 2, 3], 10]
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> > -tkc
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> 
> 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).

None of the responses worked; after import json, I used:

      for line in inputFile.readlines():
         L = json.loads(line.replace("",""))
         print L, len(L)

I get error.  I probably  misunderstood how to implement these suggestions, but I wrote a list to a csv file whose members have lists.  I now want to read them (in another program) and end up with the origianl list.