A few weeks ago I posted a request for help with regexp, split, scan, et. 
al., in an attempt to separate a comma delimited string into its component 
fields.  I just stumbled upon an obvious but previously unseen solution to 
the problem:

x = '"abc","de,f",123,4.56,"ghi"'
y = eval('['<<x<<']')

y is now:  ["abc", "de,f", 123, 4.56, "ghi"]