displaying empty list

[perfringo]

As bowlofred already said: if it's json you should save it as .json and use Python built-in tools for parsing.

However, if you have no control over input data/files then you can use ast.literal_eval() to safely evaluate an expression node or a string containing a Python literal or container display.

from ast import literal_eval

with open('literal_values.txt', 'r') as f:
    data = literal_eval(f.read())

ids = [record['id'] for record in data if record['active']]
print(ids)

Output:
[5, 25]