So I'm having an issue where when I read in info from an xml file. The data it reads in is supposed to be a list of numbers but when I read it in, it comes as a string. Is there a way to read xml data as a list or a way to convert a string to a list.
Eg I get the data from the xml as say [1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0] and if I check the type it says its a string, ie the whole thing is a string including the brackets and the comma. 
Can't wrap my head around how to convert this back to a list of numbers
For this, you would use the str.split() builtin method.
Set x = "[1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0]"
First of all, get rid of the square brackets around the string:
x = x[1:-1] (x is now "1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0", a long string)
Then, split the string to form a list of strings:
x = x.split(',') (x is now ["1.0", "2.0", "3.0", "4.0", "5.0"], a list of strings)
Then, convert all of these strings into floats (as I assume you want that):
x = [float(i) for i in x] (x is now [1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0], a list of floats)
Convert string to list in python or read xml data as list