How to convert a string with comma-delimited items to a list in Python?

Question

How do you convert a string into a list?

Say the string is like text = \"a,b,c\". After the conversion, text == [\'a\', \'b\', \'c\'] and h

Answer 1

I don't think you need to

In python you seldom need to convert a string to a list, because strings and lists are very similar

Changing the type

If you really have a string which should be a character array, do this:

In [1]: x = "foobar"
In [2]: list(x)
Out[2]: ['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r']

Not changing the type

Note that Strings are very much like lists in python

Strings have accessors, like lists

In [3]: x[0]
Out[3]: 'f'

Strings are iterable, like lists

In [4]: for i in range(len(x)):
...:     print x[i]
...:     
f
o
o
b
a
r

TLDR

Strings are lists. Almost.