How to turn a string into a list in python?

Question

l = \"[\'Hello\', \'my\', \'name\', \'is\', \'Apple\']\"
l1 = [\'Hello\', \'my\', \'name\', \'is\', \'Apple\']

type(l) returns str

Answer 1

ast.literal_eval is a nice approach. For those preferint string manipulation, another option is:

l1 = [x[1:-1] for x in l[1:-1].split(', ')]

Answer 2

the ast module has a literal_eval that does what you want

import ast
l = "['Hello', 'my', 'name', 'is', 'Apple']"
l1 = ast.literal_eval(l)

Outputs:

['Hello', 'my', 'name', 'is', 'Apple']

docs