Reading a list of lists from a file as list of lists in python
Question: I collected data in the form of list of lists and wrote the data into a text
file. The data in the text file looks like

    
    
    [[123231,2345,888754],[223467,85645]]
    

I want to read it back and store in a list of lists in my program. But when I
do `read()` from the file and try creating a flat list then it takes
everything as a string and the interpretation changes totally and i am not
able to query the result I get after reading as normal list of lists in
python.

Can someone help me with reading the file and storing in the same format as
list of lists?

Thank you!


Answer: This looks like valid [JSON](http://docs.python.org/library/json.html).

So you can simply do:

    
    
    import json
    with open(myfilename) as f:
        lst = json.load(f)
    

To store your "list of lists" in a file, do

    
    
    with open(myfilename, "w") as f:
        json.dump(lst, f)
    

