Problems converting an external .txt file into a List in Python?

Question

I have a .txt file with some strings like this:

word_1
word_2
word_3
....
word_n
word_n-1

I would like to read them and place them into list, in order to do something like this:

my_words = set(['word_1',...,'word_n-1'])

This is what I tried:

with open('/path/of/the/.txt') as f:
   lis = set([int(line.split()[0]) for line in f])
   print lis

But I get this error:

    lis = set([int(line.split()[0]) for line in f])
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '\xc3\xa9l'

What would be a better way to do this and how can I deal with the encoding of this extarnal .txt file?.

you cant covert a "word" into an int, unless your words are numeric "1", "34", etc. — Marcin
– Marcin, Commented Feb 17, 2015 at 1:06
Thanks for the help guys. @GLHF the words are just in a txt file(utf-8) — john doe
– john doe, Commented Feb 17, 2015 at 1:08

Marcin · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-17 01:08:05Z

1

I think you need something like this:

with open('file.txt') as f:
    lis = set(line.strip() for line in f)
    print lis

The result is:

set(['word_3', 'word_2', 'word_1', 'word_21', 'word_123'])

answered Feb 17, 2015 at 1:08

Marcin

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5 Comments

john doe Over a year ago

Thanks for the help!. This works any idea of how to fix encoding issues?. For example when I run this I get some encoding problems:'manifest\xc3\xb3', 'ellas', 'estuvo', 'agreg\xc3\xb3'. They're spanish words.

Marcin Over a year ago

Probably you need to look at encoding. For example something like here.

Padraic Cunningham Over a year ago

That is not an encoding problem that is the repr output printing it will look like manifestó

john doe Over a year ago

So the encoding of the words is still the same?. This is just happening by tha fact that I am printing the results on the pycharm terminal?.

Marcin Over a year ago

@johndoe Maybe its new problem. New question could be more appropriate. If you decide to create new one, linking to the file of interest or its example would be useful.

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