CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
DevEx
DevEx

Reputation: 4571

Strip extra quotes from python list

I'm retrieve some data from a web API, but the retrieved records comes with extra quotes I need to remove; result = ['"A1","Location1"', '"A2","Location2"'] What is the most efficient way to do this for a large datasets, say 10000 items so that I end up with something like this:

result = ["A1","Location1", "A2","Location2"]

Upvotes: 0

Views: 104

Answers (3)

Anzel
Anzel

Reputation: 20583

Another not great (little dirty) but working solution is to use ast.literal_eval with repr:

from ast import literal_eval

result = ['"A1","Location1"', '"A2","Location2"']    
literal_eval(repr(result).replace("\'", ""))

['A1', 'Location1', 'A2', 'Location2']

Upvotes: 0

Alex Martelli
Alex Martelli

Reputation: 882691

If each and every item of list result is a comma-separated string of "quoted" sub-items (not containing commas within a sub-item), you can easily make a new list clean as follows:

clean = []
for item in result:
    subitems = item.split(',')
    clean.extend(si[1:-1] for si in subitems)

If your constraints are more complicated (quotes may or may not be there around eadh sub-item, a quoted sub-item may contain commas, etc, etc -- I can't just blindly guess right on every detailed constrain you didn't let us know about!-) the task will be proportionately harder, perhaps involving regular expressions, or worse... but we won't know until and unless you edit your Q to specify very precisely what, exactly, you have to deal with!-)

Upvotes: 7

ajdigregorio
ajdigregorio

Reputation: 314

Use python's built in CSV module. It does this automatically.

Upvotes: -1

Related Questions