How to parse a string to a list?

Question

Is there a way in Vim to do the following:

let S = '[''123'', ''456'', ''789'']'
let L = parseStringToList(S)
" L is a list containing the string '123', '456', and '789'

Answer 1

You can do this with eval:

let S = '[''123'', ''456'', ''789'']'
let L = eval(S)

Generally, using eval is something you should be wary of. Don't run it on untrusted data. But this does solve your problem.

It's possible there's a completely different approach you should be using, but without context, it's hard to say.