Context-sensitive delimiter

[idratherbecoding]

You could use a different delimiter, say a semicolon inside the square brackets. After you have your list, you can replace the semicolon (or whichever delimiter you chose) with a comma. Something like this is what I'm thinking:

initial_text = "Richtung route, trend, way [route; direction], tendency [political etc.], course [direction], direction [course; route]"

split_text = initial_text.split(",")

final_text = [s.replace(";", ",").strip() for s in split_text]

print(final_text)

If you really need to keep commas inside the square brackets, you can use regular expressions to extract the text in brackets, replace the bracketed text with a placeholder string, split the string with a comma delimiter, and finally, replace the placeholder string with the original bracketed text.

import re

text = "Richtung route, trend, way [route, direction], tendency [political etc.], course [direction], " \
           "direction [course, route]"

brackets = re.findall(r'\[.*?\]', text)

for sub in brackets:
    text = text.replace(sub, "***") # "***" can be any sufficiently unique placeholder string that you are certain won't otherwise appear in your string

split_text = text.split(",")

final_text = []

iter_brackets = iter(brackets)
    
for s in split_text:
    temp = s
    if s.count("***") != 0:
        temp = s.replace("***", next(iter_brackets)).strip()
    final_text.append(temp)

print(final_text)

But if the commas inside the square brackets are not required, the first solution seems more straightforward to me. Hope this helps.