eval

eval

• eval is evil
• use ast.literal_eval instead

literal_eval

Safely evaluate an expression node or a Unicode or Latin-1 encoded string containing a Python literal or container display. 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 values from untrusted sources without the need to parse the values oneself. It is not capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex expressions, for example involving operators or indexing.

compat

try:
    from ast import literal_eval
except (ImportError, SyntaxError):
    # See: https://docs.python.org/2/library/ast.html
    # 32.2. ast — Abstract Syntax Trees
    # New in version 2.5: The low-level _ast module containing only the node classes.
    # New in version 2.6: The high-level ast module containing all helpers.
    literal_eval = eval

References

[1] Docs@Python, 32.2. ast — Abstract Syntax Trees — ast.literal_eval(node_or_string)