Revision history [back]

The process to transform a string that represents a list into an actual list is called "parsing" or "deserialization". One way to do this is to use a built-in function or module in a particular programming language that can parse the string and convert it into a list object.

For example, in Python, you can use the eval() function to evaluate a string as a Python expression, including a string that represents a list. You can also use the json module to parse a string that represents a JSON-encoded list.

Here's an example in Python:

my_string = "[1, 2, 3, 'hello', {'name': 'Alice'}]"
my_list = eval(my_string)
print(my_list)

Output:

[1, 2, 3, 'hello', {'name': 'Alice'}]

Note that parsing a string that represents a list can be risky because it can potentially execute arbitrary code. It's important to validate the input and ensure that it's safe to parse before doing so.