Convert a string of list to a proper list

I have the following:

a = """\"[""123456789"",""987654321""]\""""

I am trying to convert that to a list of strings. I’ve tried the following:

lst = ast.literal_eval(a)

but this returns all the characters as an individual string. What is the mistake I am doing?

The expected output: ["123456789", "987654321"]

>Solution :

You can try literal_eval twice to get a list of integers and then map each integer to strings like this :

from ast import literal_eval as le
lst = le(le(a))
lst = list(map(str, lst))

lst would now become ['123456789', '987654321']