Question

I have a long string that I want store it as a list. But it always has single quotes at the beginning and the end. How to remove them? Thanks.

Samples

>>> string
>>> '"2012-11-05", "filename", 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 0.11, 0.22, 0.33'
>>> string.split("'")
>>> ['"2012-11-05", "filename", 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 0.11, 0.22, 0.33']

Question is how can I get result like this below without single quotes?

>>> ["2012-11-05", "filename", 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 0.11, 0.22, 0.33]

Answer 1

Your data seems to be a valid python tuple.

import ast

list(ast.literal_eval('"2012-11-05", "filename", 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 0.11, 0.22, 0.33'))

The literal_eval function from the ast module is safer than plain eval, because literal_eval will not evaluate arbitrary code, just plain values.