Question

I have a question with Python 2.5 . First, I save a file in list format as below:

list_f = open("list.txt", "w")
list = [{"a" : "b", "c" : 100}, {"a" : "c", "c" : 101}]
print >> list_f, list

So, we get a list.txt like this:

[{'a' : 'b', 'c': 100}, {'a' : 'c', 'c' : 101}]

This is its only line in this file. Notice that there are two dict objects in the list and each dict has a value in String and a value in integer .

My question is how to load the file and re-create a list object as the former one.

Answer 1

import ast
with open('list.txt') as f:
    output = ast.literal_eval(f.read())

returns output as a real list of dictionaries and not as its string representation f.read() would return.

Anyway, if you are both writing and reading the file, use some serialization interface, such as cPickle or json.