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

To convert a string having the form a="[[1, 3], [2, -6]]" I wrote yet not optimized code:

matrixAr = []
mystring = "[[1, 3], [2, -4], [19, -15]]"
b=mystring.replace("[[","").replace("]]","") # to remove head [[ and tail ]]
for line in b.split('], ['):
    row =list(map(int,line.split(','))) #map = to convert the number from string (some has also space ) to integer
    matrixAr.append(row)
print matrixAr