Question

I have text file in this manner

{ a 3 56 cd 8 }
{ 1 2 3 4 ab 546 }

I am currently using the following line to parse it into a list of list

for line in filename.readlines():
    line = line.lstrip('{').rstrip('}\n').strip(' ').split(' ')

Is this the best way to do this?
Because I have heard people say that the split function should be seldom used as it slows down the script considerably.

EDIT:
I expect the output to be:

[[a,3,56,'cd',8],[1,2,3,4,'ab',546]]

Answer 1

Assuming there is no whitespace before the openening and after the closing bracket:

li = [line[1:-1].split() for line in file]

or if I can’t assume that:

li = [line.strip()[1:-1].split() for line in file]