pandas - convert string into list of strings

Or

df.Tags=df.Tags.str[1:-1].str.split(',').tolist()

I think you could use the json module.

import json
import pandas

df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', sep='|')
df['Tags'] = df['Tags'].apply(lambda x: json.loads(x))

So this will load your dataframe as before, then apply a lambda function to each of the items in the Tags column. The lambda function calls json.loads() which converts the string representation of the list to an actual list.

You can split the string manually:

>>> df['Tags'] = df.Tags.apply(lambda x: x[1:-1].split(','))
>>> df.Tags[0]
['Tag1', 'Tag2']