use a html parser for this job, such as BeautifulSoup. If you don't want to, then another way is to read the whole html, split on "</div>", go through each element in the list, check for "<div...

you do it systematically using the same way to read single level dict
d={'AAA': {'KEY1':'text1', 'KEY2':'text2', 'KEY3': 'text3', 'KEY4': 'text4'},
'BBB': {'BBB1':{'KEY1':'text1', 'KEY2':'text2',...

one method i always use is the os.path.join() method.

dir = os.path.join("C:\\","documents and settings","user","desktop")
starcraftpath = os.path.join(dir,"starcraft.exe")

takes care of the...

if in the file, the content is indeed this:

[1,2,3,4]

then when you read the file line by line, you can use eval() to turn it into a list

for line in open("file"):
alist = eval(line)
...