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Q: How to convert a string to a list in a dictionary in python So I'm working with Google Sheets and python. And I want to pull data from a cell and add it to a dictionary as a list. So I get a cell's content and it's just a string but I want to convert it to a list and append that to a dictionary Here is what the cell content looks like: "['1/5/2022 8:00:00', 8, 'Name']" Here is what I currently have: sheet = wks.get_all_records() dateTime = sheet[0]['Date'] print(sheet[0]['Date']) >> "['1/5/2022 8:00:00', 8, 'Name']" I want to get: ["1/5/2022 8:00:00", 8, "Name"] Is there any built-in python function that can do this? or is there any way to do this with the json module? Thanks A: You can use the ast.literal_eval to do this. In [1]: x = "['1/5/2022 8:00:00', 8, 'Name']" In [2]: import ast In [3]: ast.literal_eval(x) Out[3]: ['1/5/2022 8:00:00', 8, 'Name'] Note that if you are not sure if every item in the dict has a parsable value like this, you can write a function to help: def maybe_literal_eval(x): if isinstance(x, str): try: return ast.literal_eval(x) except ValueError: return x return x Then apply it to every value in the dict: {k: maybe_literal_eval(v) for k, v in sheet.items()}