Q:

Converting a String to a List of Dictionaries

I have one column of a pandas dataframe whose elements are of the form '[{"foo": 42, "bar": "conversion"}]'.  That is, they are all lists of dictionaries (of varying length) but saved in the dataframe as strings.  
Is there a way to make this column contain actual lists of dictionaries?  

A:

import json
json.loads('[{"foo": 42, "bar": "conversion"}]')
# [{u'bar': u'conversion', u'foo': 42}]

This will only work if your strings are in json format, but the example is so it's very likely that it will work.

