How to convert a list to string and vice versa?

Question

I have a list: ('47075', 'josenestle', 'i need help') I do str1 = str(list) and have it in string.

However if you do list(str1) I do not recover my list.

I find no obvious solution, help would be very grateful.

Answer 1

As commented, the answer presented does not solve the problem presented. If you have an object, you want to convert it to a string and later convert it back, you will need to use some serialization technique. In Python, the most common library for this is the pickle. To serialize, aka convert the object to a representation in string, the function is used pickle.dumps() and to convert back to the original object uses the function pickle.loads(), see documentation.

Whereas you own the object:

obj = ('47075', 'josenestle', 'i need help')

You can serialize it with:

obj_serialized = pickle.dumps(obj)

This way you will have a sequence of bytes representing its object. For example, the value of obj_serialized will be:

b'\x80\x03X\x05\x00\x00\x0047075q\x00X\n\x00\x00\x00josenestleq\x01X\x0b\x00\x00\x00i need helpq\x02\x87q\x03.'

After doing everything necessary with the object serialized, you can retrieve the object with:

obj_recuperado = pickle.loads(obj_serialized)

Getting:

('47075', 'josenestle', 'i need help')

It represents exactly the original object. Note that it is not the same object, but an object with the same value. You can prove this by checking his relationship to the original object:

print(obj == obj_recuperado)  # True
print(obj is obj_recuperado)  # False

Answer 2

I found the answer!

>>> import ast
>>> x = u'[ "A","B","C" , " D"]'
>>> x = ast.literal_eval(x)
>>> x
['A', 'B', 'C', ' D']
>>> x = [n.strip() for n in x]
>>> x
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']

Using "Ast.literal_eval" I have a safe way to evaluate strings literally.