A data conversion question

[Mok-Kong Shen]

A newbie's question of curiosity:

If I have

g=[1,[2]] and

bg=bytearray(str(g),"latin-1")

could I somehow get back from bg a list g1 that is the same as g?

Thanks in advance.

M. K. Shen

 

[Peter Otten]

A newbie's question of curiosity:

If I have

g=[1,[2]] and

bg=bytearray(str(g),"latin-1")

could I somehow get back from bg a list g1 that is the same as g?

Not for arbitrary values, but for lists, ints, and a few other types that's
not a problem:

g = [1, [2]]
bg = bytearray(str(g), "latin-1")
bg bytearray(b'[1, [2]]')
import ast
ast.literal_eval(bg.decode("latin-1"))

[1, [2]]

See also https://docs.python.org/dev/library/ast.html#ast.literal_eval

Note that while eval() instead of ast.literal_eval() would also work you
should avoid it. eval() can execute arbitrary Python code and is thus a big
security whole when applied to user-provided data.