Here's a quick example for macOS based on this) that doesn't require additional packages.

import subprocess

list_to_put_on_clipboard = [(('infection',), 548), (('data',), 543), (('plant',), 514), (('host',), 513), (('species',), 489)]
list_as_str = '\n'.join([str(item) for item in list_to_put_on_clipboard])
subprocess.run("pbcopy", universal_newlines=True, input=list_as_str)

Here is the result when copying to excel

Notes:

• Not all types may support conversion to str
• You may want to use a different delimiter than '\n' above, but '\n' produces what I think is the desired Excel output in this case

For other operating systems, according to comments in the above link, instead of "pbcopy" use:

• "xclip" for Linux
• "clip" for Windows

On macOS, use subprocess.run to pipe your text to pbcopy:

import subprocess 
data = "hello world"
subprocess.run("pbcopy", text=True, input=data)

It will copy "hello world" to the clipboard.

From your comments, it's become clear that you're not actually asking how to read the contents of the clipboard; you're just asking how to parse some data that happen to have come from the clipboard (presumably by you/the user manually pasting it).

So the real question is: how do you parse something that looks kind of like a list literal from Python source?

If it actually is a list literal from Python source, you use the literal_eval function from the ast module:

>>> import ast
>>> s = "['a',2, (4,'b')]"
>>> lst = ast.literal_eval(s)
>>> print(lst)
['a', 2, (4, 'b')]

However, if you don't actually know where the data come from, there's a good chance it's actually JSON (which you should parse with json.loads), YAML, or some other format that's superficially similar to Python literals but not identical. If you try to parse JSON with literal_eval, it'll work on your initial tests, and then fail in real life because of a false instead of False or similar. That's why it's important to actually know what kind of data you have. If it came from Python source code, or from some Python script calling print with a list, that's what literal_eval is for.