Convert string into list Python

Question

So I've got some data which I scraped from a website and it looks like this:

table = '[['January 2010',1368,719],['February 2010',1366,729] ... ['April 2018',1429,480],['Today',1440,448]]'

It's already formatted pretty well but how would I go about converting this string into a list of lists that looks the exact same but simply has a list datatype instead of string?

I tried just converting the datatype but that didn't give me the right answer:

> print(list(table))
> ['[', '[', "'", 'J', 'a' ... '4', '4', '8', ']', ']']

Thanks in advance

• Rakesh: Use the ast module Ex: ast.literal_eval(table)
• llllllllll: @deepakborania stackoverflow.com/questions/1832940/…
• Austin: Possible duplicate of Convert string representation of list to list

Answer 1

Use ast.literal_eval:

In [24]: import ast
In [25]: ast.literal_eval(table)
Out[25]: 
[['January 2010', 1368, 719],
 ['February 2010', 1366, 729],
 ['April 2018', 1429, 480],
 ['Today', 1440, 448]]

Answer 2

Found a more intricate solution to this, but this could be more complicated and requires that the strings are equally sized:

_data = {'000000222222000000': {4: '0000022aaad2200000',
 5: '000002adaada200000',
 6: '00002aadaaada20000',
 7: '00002adadacaa20000',
 8: '0002d0addadc0a2000'}}
import pandas as pd, numpy as np
_df = pd.DataFrame(_data)
df = _df.iloc[:, 0].apply(list).apply(pd.Series)
Output:
 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
4 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 a a a d 2 2 0 0 0 0 0
5 0 0 0 0 0 2 a d a a d a 2 0 0 0 0 0
6 0 0 0 0 2 a a d a a a d a 2 0 0 0 0
7 0 0 0 0 2 a d a d a c a a 2 0 0 0 0
8 0 0 0 2 d 0 a d d a d c 0 a 2 0 0 0

To get what you are looking for, I imagine you could do a trick where you test for the longest string in the list, convert your lists to a dictionary with unique keys, pad each string with a leading or trailing number of characters, and then simplify the dataframe. I can go through if required, but I did not need to for my version of this problem.