The other answers here are very much correct, and valuable. But sometimes you just want simple: to get a plain old parsed value at directive instantiation, without needing updates, and without messing with isolate scope. For instance, it can be handy to provide a declarative payload into your directive as an array or hash-object in the form:
my-directive-name="['string1', 'string2']"
In that case, you can cut to the chase and just use a nice basic angular.$eval(attr.attrName)
.
element.val("value = "+angular.$eval(attr.value));
Working Fiddle.