Convert a columns of string to list in pandas

Use str.strip and str.split:

df['LABELS'] = df['LABELS'].str.strip('()').str.split(',')

But if no NaNs here, list comprehension working nice too:

df['LABELS'] = [x.strip('()').split(',') for x in df['LABELS']]

You can use ast.literal_eval, which will give you a tuple:

import ast
df.LABELS = df.LABELS.apply(ast.literal_eval)

If you do want a list, use:

df.LABELS.apply(lambda s: list(ast.literal_eval(s)))

Sorry I was late to the party. So for other latecomers I got this to work based on the above replies:

df['hashtags'] = df.apply(lambda row:  row['hashtags'].strip('[]').replace('"', '').replace(' ', '').split(',')   , axis=1)

I loaded a csv with some columns looking like this ...,['hashtag1','hashtag2'],... and the Panda DataFrame loaded it as a string object. I used the above code and it converted to list. I then used "explode" to flatten the data.