Question

I want to convert a string like this:

"asd foo bar ( lol bla ( gee bee ) lee ) ree"

to a list like this:

["asd","foo","bar",["lol","bla",["gee","bee"],"lee"],"ree"]

Is there an easy solution?

edit: It should work for any number and depth of parantheses, but it only has to work for valid strings (no single parantheses)

edit2: Spaces can be seen as delimiters, if it doesn’t match it may raise an error or just not work, I don’t care. It just has to work for well-formed strings.

Answer 1

You can use Python’s parser to do the job. Just help it a little:

>>> a = "asd foo bar ( lol bla ( gee bee ) lee ) ree"
>>> eval(str(a.split()).replace("'(',", '[').replace("')'",']'))
['asd', 'foo', 'bar', ['lol', 'bla', ['gee', 'bee'], 'lee'], 'ree']

If you need it to be safe, use ast.literal_eval instead!