How can I turn a string into a list in Python?

The list() function ^[docs] will convert a string into a list of single-character strings.

>>> list('hello')
['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']

Even without converting them to lists, strings already behave like lists in several ways. For example, you can access individual characters (as single-character strings) using brackets:

>>> s = "hello"
>>> s[1]
'e'
>>> s[4]
'o'

You can also loop over the characters in the string as you can loop over the elements of a list:

>>> for c in 'hello':
...     print c + c,
... 
hh ee ll ll oo