One of my students scraped a website and built a CSV from the data. Inadvertently, he had some columns that appeared to contain a list of Python dictionaries. To his surprise, he found he could not read these as lists or as dictionaries directly from his CSV.
I knew that they were stored as strings, and I knew there must be a way to restore the data to its original data types. Google led me to Stack Overflow (of course), and the solution could hardly be simpler:
from ast import literal_eval result = literal_eval(my_string)
We were then able to pluck out the value of a given dictionary key-value pair with ease.
ast is a built-in module (see docs).
