I am trying to read a file using the following statement:
input = open("input.txt").read().split('\n')
So basically my objective is to read the file line by line and store results in an array. It works perfect when the file is not empty. When input file has only one line len(input) is 1, which is as expected.
But when the file is empty, len(input) still gives 1. What am I doing wrong?
You should use open("input.txt").readlines(), not open("input.txt").read().split("\n"). If you try "".split("\n") in the interpreter, you will see that the result is [''], not [].
Iterating a file gives you the lines, so you could use:
the_input = list(open("input.txt"))
though this will include the newline characters in the strings.
Well, this is how split works: This is happening:
>>> ''.split(',')
['']
and it is a list of one element which is the empty string.
Reading the empty file returns "", and then splitting that empty string returns [""], which has length 1.
Try this instead:
lines = open("empty.txt").readlines()
