Convert string representation of list of objects back to list in python

Question

I have a list of objects, that has been stringified:

u'[<object: objstuff1, objstuff2>, <object: objstuff1, objstuff2>]'

I want to convert this back into a list:

[<object: objstuff1, objstuff2>, <object: objstuff1, objstuff2>]

I've tried using ast.literal_eval(), but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work if the elements are objects, and I get a SyntaxError.

Is there any way I can reconvert my string representation of the list of objects back into a list?

Anshul Goyal · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-20 02:45:28Z

2

You need to have a look at the pickle module to do this.

Basically, dump your objects using pickle.dumps, and load them back using pickle.loads.

ast.literal_eval doesn't work obviously, because there is a lot of information related to the objects (like attributes, and values) which is simply not captured in that string. Also note that you will be able to resurrect only the pickled data, if all you have are those string representations right now, you won't be able to create the objects back from them because of the information loss.

answered Apr 20, 2015 at 2:45

Anshul Goyal

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