title: How to convert a string to a list of string?
body: <p>I have a string:</p>
  <pre><code>s = &quot;['9780310714675', '9780763630614', '9781416925330', '9780310714569']&quot;
  </code></pre>
  <p>when loaded into memory, this becomes:</p>
  <pre><code>'[\'9780310714675\', \'9780763630614\', \'9781416925330\', \'9780310714569\']'
  </code></pre>
  <p>I wonder how to convert it to a list of strings:</p>
  <pre><code>strList = ['9780310714675', '9780763630614', '9781416925330', '9780310714569']
  </code></pre>
  <p>I have tried to do this using:</p>
  <pre><code>strList = json.loads(s)
  </code></pre>
  <p>but then I got the following error:</p>
  <pre><code>Traceback (most recent call last):
    File &quot;/home/xxx/dev/python/data-processing/MongoDB/query.py&quot;, line 101, in &lt;module&gt;
      isbnList = marcQuery.stringToStringList(isbnString)
    File &quot;/home/xxx/dev/python/data-processing/MongoDB/query.py&quot;, line 74, in stringToStringList
      strList = json.loads(s)
    File &quot;/home/xxx/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/json/__init__.py&quot;, line 348, in loads
      return _default_decoder.decode(s)
    File &quot;/home/xxx/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py&quot;, line 337, in decode
      obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
    File &quot;/home/xxx/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py&quot;, line 355, in raw_decode
      raise JSONDecodeError(&quot;Expecting value&quot;, s, err.value) from None
  json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 2 (char 1)
  </code></pre>
  <p>Can anyone give me some hints on how to do this?</p>