I have a .txt file like this:
John 26
Mary 48
Nick 34
I want import them and put them in a list so that I can find specific elements. For example age[1] would have the value 48, name[1] the value Mary etc.
I tried doing
import sys,random
f = open('example.txt', 'r')
for line in f:
tokens=line.split()
a=tokens[0]
print a[1]
but the result of print a[1] is the second letter of each string.
Instead of a[1], you want tokens[1].
This is the value of a, which is the first element of tokens:
Nick
But the second element of tokens is the age:
"34"
As @user mentioned, you probably wanted to have it as integer, not a string. You can convert it to integer:
a = int(tokens[1])
@thefourtheye proposed a nice solution. I think i'll propose to store it in a dictionary:
with open('example.txt') as f:
ages = {}
for line in f:
d = line.split()
ages[d[0]] = int(d[1])
And here is ages:
{'John':26, 'Mary':48, 'Nick':34}
To retrieve the age of John:
print(ages['John'])
Hope this helps!
tokens[1] is a string, so trying to do math with it won't work properly unless you convert it to an int first.
tokens[1] is not the whole column, it's the age of the current line. Presumably the reason you're seeing a whole column is that you're just trying to print all of the names and ages, rather than storing them in any age and name lists. To do that, just age.append(a) instead of print(a). (Or do it thefourtheye's way.)with, so that you dont have to worry about closing the file.Then, you can read lines and split them and finally unzip them like this
with open('Input.txt', 'r') as inFile:
names, ages = zip(*(line.rstrip().split() for line in inFile))
print names, ages
Output
('John', 'Mary', 'Nick') ('26', '48', '34')
You can access the individual names and ages like this
names[0], ages[0]
map choice and you beat me to it).