We are trying to use pydantic and pydantic settings in our django app

We have an environment setting such as
ENV_VAR = A,B,C,

if I use

env_var: list[str] = []

I get a pydantic parsing error

if I use

env_var: str = []

it parses this but further code treats it as a str

ie

for var in ENV_VAR:
print (var)

fails

I tried a custom validator to split the env var but this made no difference

Thanks for any help