List and Dictionaries with Pandas

[Balinor]

Hi...

I'm trying to use pandas to read data from an excel file:

df = pd.read_excel('C:testfile.xls', sheet)

My excel file has a list (of strings) in one of the cells (header row in bold)...
test input1 input2
TEST1 HELLO ['VAL1', 'VAL2']
TEST2 HELLO2 ['VAL3', 'VAL4', 'VAL5', 'VAL6']

My problem is that when I read in input2 I seem to get a string: ['VAl1', 'VAL2'], instead of a list containing VAL1 and VAL2.

Is there a way to use panda to read in the value as a python list? I will need to read in a list of dictionaries later on, so it will get even more complex...

test expva1 expva2
TEST1 BYE [{indent: 'VAL1', indent2: 'VAL2', indent3: 'VAL3}, {indent: 'VAL4', indent2: 'VAL5', indent3: 'VAL6}, {indent: 'VAL7', indent2: 'VAL8', indent3: 'VAL9}]
TEST2 BYE2 [{indent: 'VALA', indent2: 'VALB', indent3: 'VALC}, {indent: 'VALD', indent2: 'VALE', indent3: 'VALF}]

I'd like to be able to read this in as a python list of dictionaries using panda. Is this possible? I cannot find examples anywhere, so I'm wondering if perhaps panda is not the right module to use here...

Any help is appreciated, including other non-panda solutions.

Thanks!!!