test a boolean expression in a Python string

Question

I have a boolean expression in a string. eg. 20 < 30. Is there a simple way to parse and evaluate this string so it will return True (in this case).

ast.literal_eval("20 < 30") does not work.

Answer 1

Is this a user-defined string, or one you're defining?

If it's a string you're creating, you could use eval (eval("20 < 30")), but if the string is given by the user, you might want to sanitize it first...

Answer 2

>>> eval("20<30")
True