I have a select box in a form that returns a lines setting. If course, as the status are with the incredibly stupid HTML standard, if nothing is selected, the request variable doesn't exist. To fix this I tried doing this: <input type="hidden" name="foobar:lines:default" value=""> As expected, when nothing was selected I now got a default value. Great. But, the default value was not the empty list I wanted, but it was [''], a list with an empty string! I tried changing the value to "[]" which only resulted in ['[]'] which was even more wrong... OK, it wasn't a problem, since I was using it for a search-form, and [''] in a catalog search will give the same results as [], but it still is the wrong result. Now for the question: I'm I stupid and missing something essential here, or is this a bug? I'm using Zope 2.3.3.