Turn a string that is a formatted list into a list

Question

I have a string

'[comedy, drama]'

that is a type str but appears to look like a list. Is there a quick change I can apply to turn it into a list with the two entries being both type str?

Answer 1

>>> '[comedy, drama]'[1:-1].split(', ')
['comedy', 'drama']

Answer 2

Quickest is

>>> s = '[comedy, drama]'
>>> s[1:-1].split(',')

Answer 3

Are the brackets and , part of the string? If so, you can just use str.split and str.strip .

s = '[comedy, drama, tragedy]'
wordList = s.replace(" ", "").strip("[]").split(",")

I have included s.replace(" ", "") so that it is agnostic as to whether they are split by ", " or by just ",", even mixed is fine.