Remove single quote from list in Python

Question

I have an input string as:

result = '"testing","0.8841","642000.0","80.014521","-60.940653","4522126666","1500854400","","1500842014000","name","80.014521","-60.996532","sampledevice","3","name"'

data = result.split("\n")

i = 0
while i < len(data):
    i = i +1 
    dd = data[i].split(',')
    print dd
    break

And the corresponding output as:

[
  '"testing"',
  '"0.8841"',
  '"642000.0"',
  '"80.014521"',
  '"-60.940653"',
  '"4522126666"',
  '"1500854400"',
  '""',
  '"1500842014000"',
  '"name"',
  '"80.014521"',
  '"-60.996532"',
  '"sampledevice"',
  '"3"',
  '"name"'
]

How can I remove the single quotes from each element in the list?

Answer 1

Treat the text as a row from a CSV formatted file:

import csv
import StringIO

result = '"testing","0.8841","642000.0","80.014521","-60.940653","4522126666","1500854400","","1500842014000","name","80.014521","-60.996532","sampledevice","3","name"'
print next(csv.reader(StringIO.StringIO(result)))

Giving you:

['testing', '0.8841', '642000.0', '80.014521', '-60.940653', '4522126666', '1500854400', '', '1500842014000', 'name', '80.014521', '-60.996532', 'sampledevice', '3', 'name']

Python's StringIO() function allows the text to be treated like a file allowing it to be passed to Python's CSV parser which is designed for parsing CSV files in this format. It can then correctly parse the text and return a list of items.

---

The returned data could then be further processed if needed to convert the text into numbers, i.e. integers or floats as appropriate. For example:

import csv
import StringIO

def convert(text):
    try:
        return int(text)
    except ValueError:
        pass

    try:
        return float(text)
    except ValueError:
        return text


result = '"testing","0.8841","642000.0","80.014521","-60.940653","4522126666","1500854400","","1500842014000","name","80.014521","-60.996532","sampledevice","3","name"'
values = [convert(value) for value in next(csv.reader(StringIO.StringIO(result)))]

print values

This would then return a list as follows:

['testing', 0.8841, 642000.0, 80.014521, -60.940653, 4522126666L, 1500854400, '', 1500842014000L, 'name', 80.014521, -60.996532, 'sampledevice', 3, 'name']

Answer 2

literal_eval is good solution for this issue

import ast
dd = [ast.literal_eval(i) for i in data]