stringified list to two separate lists

Question

I have a stringified list that looks something like this:

'[a:1,b:1,c:2,a:3]'

I want to separate this into two lists.

['a','b','c','d'] and [1,1,2,3]

is there any pythonic way of doing this without using eval (it doesnt work anyways)?

Answer 1

You can use re.findall() to find the characters and numbers and zip function to separate them :

>>> a='[a:1,b:1,c:2,a:3]'

>>> import re
>>> zip(*re.findall(r'([a-z]):(\d)',a))
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'a'), ('1', '1', '2', '3')]

Answer 2

import re
zip(*re.findall(r'([a-z]):([0-9])', my_string))

Depending your use, you can also add some + :

>>> zip(*re.findall(r'([a-z]+):([0-9]+)', '[a:1,blabla:1,c:20,a:3]'))
[('a', 'blabla', 'c', 'a'), ('1', '1', '20', '3')]

Answer 3

Just to go a little bit further in the requirement to get a list of ints:

str = '[a:1,b:1,c:2,a:3]'
p,q = zip(*[(x,int(y)) for x,y in re.findall('([a-z]+):(\d+)', str)])