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User input of code.

I use this in my Python data processing scripts. That is, when I generate data, I generate it as Python literals, either lists or dictionaries. When I have to process it, minimal parsing needed, I just eval it into my code.

  def parse_and_append(line, seq, str):
    if str in line:
        seq.append(eval(line[line.find(str) + len(str):]))

  nums = []
  mappings = {}
  for line in data_file:
    parse_and_append(line, nums, "nums: ")
    parse_and_append(line, mappings, "mappings: ")
Terribly insecure for webpages, sure, but very efficient use of my time.



JSON will let you do that just as well. Or, if you must, there's ast.literal_eval which will only allow Python literals.


I see no reason to use JavaScript to process my data files - keep in mind this is data post-processing of experiments, not a user-facing application. And I enjoy Python, so I'll stick with it. But thanks for the pointer to literal_eval, I have not explored that part of the standard library.




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