Convert a string to a list of floats (in python)

Question

For data storage purposes I am trying to recover lists of floats from a .txt file. From the string like:

a = \'[1.3, 2.3, 4.5]\'

I want to recover:<

Answer 1

a = a.split(",")
a[0] = a[0][1:]
a[-1] = a[-1][:-1]
a = [float(i) for i in a]

This should work :)