convert csv file to list of dictionaries

Use csv.DictReader:

import csv

with open('test.csv') as f:
    a = [{k: int(v) for k, v in row.items()}
        for row in csv.DictReader(f, skipinitialspace=True)]

Will result in :

[{'col2': 2, 'col3': 3, 'col1': 1}, {'col2': 5, 'col3': 6, 'col1': 4}]