Read the written list of dictionaries from file in Python

Question

I have a file which is a list of dictionaries in this way:

[{'text': 'this is the text', 'filed1': 'something1', 'filed2': 'something2', 'subtexts': [{'body': 'body of subtext1', 'date': 'xx'}, {'body': 'body of subtext2', 'date': 'yy'}}]

The list of nested dictionaries and lists can have multiples dicts and lists inside. I want to read the file which is written exactly like this in python and create a data structure (list of dictionaries). How can it be done knowing it's not json but it has written to file by file.write(str(list)) where list is something we want to read back from file?

Answer 1

Use ast.literal_eval which is a safe way of evaluating Python literals (as opposed to eval) into actual data structures.

That is:

import ast

with open('file.txt') as f:
    data = ast.literal_eval(f.read())

If you have something beyond the supported types (strings, bytes, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, sets, booleans, and None), you can use my recipe in this answer.