title: Break string into list of characters in Python
body: <p>Essentially I want to suck a line of text from a file, assign the characters to a list, and create a list of all the separate characters in a list -- a list of lists.</p>
  
  <p>At the moment, I've tried this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>fO = open(filename, 'rU')
  fL = fO.readlines()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That's all I've got. I don't quite know how to extract the single characters and assign them to a new list.</p>
  
  <p>The line I get from the file will be something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>fL = 'FHFF HHXH XXXX HFHX'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to turn it into this list, with each single character on its own:</p>
  
  <pre><code>['F', 'H', 'F', 'F', 'H', ...]
  </code></pre>