Question

I have a text file which is named test.txt. I want to read it and return a list of all words (with newlines removed) from the file.

This is my current code:

def read_words(test.txt):
    open_file = open(words_file, 'r')
    words_list =[]
    contents = open_file.readlines()
    for i in range(len(contents)):
         words_list.append(contents[i].strip('\n'))
    return words_list    
    open_file.close()  

Running this code produces this list:

['hello there how is everything ', 'thank you all', 'again', 'thanks a lot']

I want the list to look like this:

['hello','there','how','is','everything','thank','you','all','again','thanks','a','lot']

Answer 1

Replace the words_list.append(...) line in the for loop with the following:

words_list.extend(contents[i].split())

This will split each line on whitespace characters, and then add each element of the resulting list to words_list.

Or as an alternative method for rewriting the entire function as a list comprehension:

def read_words(words_file):
    return [word for line in open(words_file, 'r') for word in line.split()]