Remove items from a tuple in string format

Question

Here is my string

a = '(20.0, 8.0, 8.0, 37.0)'

and i want only first three items in this format

str = 20.0x8.0x8.0 

and store the last item in a list.

leftover = [37.0]

Earlier I had only three dimensions in the string so I was using replace function multiple times to convert it.

converted = str(''.join(str(v) for v in a)).replace("(","").replace(")","").replace(", ","x")

I know it's not the most pythonic way but it was doing the trick. But I have no clue how to remove an element from str(tuple)

Answer 1

Use ast.literal_eval:

import ast

a = '(20.0, 8.0, 8.0, 37.0)'

a_tupl = ast.literal_eval(a)

string = 'x'.join(map(str, a_tupl[:3]))  # 20.0x8.0x8.0
leftover = [a_tupl[-1]]  # [37.0]

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Don't name your variable as str, because it shadows the built-in.