string to list or string to array

[Swami Tota Ram Shankar <tota_ram@india.com>]

Friends, I am trying to read text from a file opened in emacs and
recognize it as array or list so that I can do some vector additions
using mapcar.

I am mainly stuck at the stage of converting the string text to array
or list.

The method which I use to locate the text is "looking-at" function and
the regexp works.

(when (looking-at "[[0-9.+-\\ ]+]")

some code that is to play around for debugging and messaging and
checking the match
(forward-char (+ (string-width (match-string 0)) 1))
(setq V (match-string 0))
(setq V (intern (match-string 0)))


The cursor is placed on the start bracket, ie "["

and text looks like for example array of indefinite length

[17.16 -17.16 17.16 17.16 17.16 17.16 17.16 17.16]


Please suggest some different solutions that can take the string
matched, match-string for example and convert to a list or an array on
which I can do mapcars or lambdas.

Thanks
Swami