title: convert unicode array to numpy
body: <p>I have arrays of unicode strings like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>u'[(12520, 12540), (16600, 16620)]'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and need to convert these to numpy arrays. A <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6375343/reading-unicode-elements-into-numpy-array">similar question</a> treats the problem of already having an array with unicode elements, but in my case the brackets are part of the string. Is there a way of directly converting this to a numpy array (of ints) without having to manually remove the brackets?</p>