Convert a string to a list of floats (in python)

Question

For data storage purposes I am trying to recover lists of floats from a .txt file. From the string like:

a = \'[1.3, 2.3, 4.5]\'

I want to recover:<

Answer 1

Use the ast module.

Ex

import ast
print(ast.literal_eval('[1.3, 2.3, 4.5]'))

Output:

[1.3, 2.3, 4.5]