Parsing a string which represents a list of tuples

Question

I have strings which look like this one:

\"(8, 12.25), (13, 15), (16.75, 18.5)\"

and I would like to convert each of them into a python dat

Answer 1

Download PyParsing.

I've worked with it before. You can get some pretty robust parsing behavior out of it, and I think it provides builtins that will handle your entire parsing needs with this sort of thing. Look up commaSeparatedList and nestedExpr.