Question

I am very new at programming. I have the following problem.

I want to take some floats from a .txt file, and add them to a Python list as strings, with a comma between them, like this:

.TXT:
194220.00   38.4397984  S   061.1720742 W   0.035
194315.00   38.4398243  S   061.1721378 W   0.036

Python:

myList = ('38.4397984,061.1720742','38.4398243,061.1721378')

Does anybody know how to do this? Thank you!

Answer 1

There are three key pieces you’ll need to do this. You’ll need to know how to open files, you’ll need to know how to iterate through the lines with the file open, and you’ll need to know how to split the list.

Once you know all these things, it’s as simple as concatenating the pieces you want and adding them to your list.

my_list = []
with open('path/to/my/file.txt') as f:
    for line in f:
        words = line.split()
        my_list.append(words[1] + words[3])
print mylist