Converting Python exported list .txt to regular Python list

Question

I am trying to convert a .txt file to regular Python list. I have done this before, but the previous situations have involved manually constructed files. I am currently trying to process a .txt file that was composed by another Python script that wrote a list into said .txt file. I am not sure why these formats are being perceived as different by Python

Here is what I mean:

The first .txt looked like:

(Let's call it x.txt)

I like dogs
Go home 
This is the greatest Ice Cream ever

Now if I do:

f = open('x.txt', encoding = "utf8")

z = f.readlines()

print(z)

I get

['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

This is exactly what I want ^

My current .txt file looks like:

(Let's call it y.txt)

['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

Now if I do:

f = open('y.txt', encoding = "utf8")

z = f.readlines()

print(z)

I get a bizarre output that looks like:

['[\'I like dogs. \', \'Go home\', \'This is the greatest Ice Cream 
ever\',]]

I thought double brackets only existed really in Pandas? Where am I going wrong here? How can I get a regular list format output.

Note: To provide some context, I am trying to feed this list into some text cleaning script. When I try to feed that second output into it, I don't get an error, but it turns the list of strings into one long string in a list like: ['IlikedogsGohomeThisisthegreatestIceCreamever']

When you're saving ['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever'] inside the text file, they will be saved with string formatting and again while you do readlines() these list-of-strings-converted-to-single-string would be inside a list. — Arkistarvh Kltzuonstev
– Arkistarvh Kltzuonstev, Commented Mar 27, 2019 at 6:19
@pistol2myhead I figured something like that was the problem. Do you know a way around it? — find_all
– find_all, Commented Mar 28, 2019 at 4:44

Arkistarvh Kltzuonstev · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-28 05:05:18Z

If your 'y.txt' file contains this ['I like dogs', 'Go home', 'This is the greatest Ice Cream ever'] without string formatting and after reading the text lines you want to get the list assigned to some variable, try this :

from ast import literal_eval
with open('y.txt', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f:
    b = f.readlines()
    print(b)    # OUTPUT - ["['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']"]
    l = literal_eval(b[0])
    print(l)    # OUTPUT - ['I like dogs', 'Go home', 'This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

There is one restriction to using the above code - this will work only if the text file contains a single list. If it contains multiple list inside 'y.txt', try this :

from ast import literal_eval
with open('y.txt', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f:
    b = f.readlines()
    l = [literal_eval(k.strip()) for k in b]

Divyanshu Srivastava · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-27 06:22:03Z

0

List can be extracted directly from y.txt as

>>> with open('y.txt', 'r') as file:
...     line = file.readlines()[0].split("'")[1::2]
... 
>>> line
['I like dogs', 'Go home', 'This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

answered Mar 27, 2019 at 6:22

Divyanshu Srivastava

1,54713 silver badges26 bronze badges

2 Comments

find_all Over a year ago

Same as above: Unfortunately I get a "'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 8090: character maps to <undefined>" error here. There are non alphabetic characters in my real data.

Divyanshu Srivastava Over a year ago

Worked perfectly fine on my machine for both versions of python.

Underoos · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-28 07:52:05Z

0

If there is only one line that contains your list as a string and it is the first line, I would suggest you to try this

fil = open('y.txt', 'r', encoding="utf-8")
lis = eval(fil.readlines()[0])

now you should be able to use list - lis

Let me know if that worked.

edited Mar 28, 2019 at 7:52

answered Mar 27, 2019 at 7:34

Underoos

5,2769 gold badges55 silver badges106 bronze badges

1 Comment

find_all Over a year ago

Unfortunately I get a "'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 8090: character maps to <undefined>" error here. There are non alphabetic characters in my real data.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Converting Python exported list .txt to regular Python list

3 Answers 3

Comments

2 Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

Comments

2 Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related