python - converting string to tuple

Question

I need to write a function that takes a string '(1,2,3,4,5),(5,4,3,2,1)' and returns a list of tuples of the 1st and last element of each tuple, [(1,5),(5,1)]. I was thinking:

def f(givenstring):
    a=givenstring.split(',')
    for i in a[0:-1]:
        tuple(int(i[0,-1]))

but here I'm stucked..

Answer 1

You can use ast.literal_eval():

Safely evaluate an expression node or a string containing a Python expression. The string or node provided may only consist of the following Python literal structures: strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, booleans, and None.

This can be used for safely evaluating strings containing Python expressions from untrusted sources without the need to parse the values oneself.

In your example:

from ast import literal_eval
s = '(1,2,3,4,5),(5,4,3,2,1)'

l = literal_eval(s)
print l
# ((1, 2, 3, 4, 5), (5, 4, 3, 2, 1))

print [(x[0], x[-1]) for x in l]
# [(1, 5), (5, 1)]