XML : How can Python get a List from XML such as unicode to a list?

i have a problem in reading XML. i want to get a 2D array. However, i get a problem. when i get the data from the XML. the type of data is unicode. Hence, i type to use list(). However, the result does not achieve my goal. Could i use the other way to get the 2D list? How can i remove u, \n, \t and get a correct answer. Thank you.

abc.xml

  <text>      <item id="1">          [              [2, 2, 1]              [1, 0, 0]               [1, 0, 0]             ]      </item>    </text>    

PYTHON:

  import  xml.dom.minidom    dom = xml.dom.minidom.parse('abc.xml')    bb = dom.getElementsByTagName('item')  b=bb[0]    l= b.firstChild.data  print l    a=list(l)  print a    

The OUTPUT:

  [                      [2, 2, 1]                      [1, 0, 0]                       [1, 0, 0]                 ]    [u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\t', u'\t', u'[', u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\t', u'\t', u'\t', u'[', u'2', u',', u' ', u'2', u',', u' ', u'1', u']', u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\t', u'\t', u'\t', u'[', u'1', u',', u' ', u'0', u',', u' ', u'0', u']', u' ', u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\t', u'\t', u'\t', u'[', u'1', u',', u' ', u'0', u',', u' ', u'0', u']', u' ', u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\t', u'\t', u']', u'\n', u' ', u' ', u' ', u' ', u'\t']  [Finished in 0.1s]