Question

I want a Python program to import a list of words from a text file and print out the content of the text file as two lists. The data in the text file is on this form:

A Alfa B Betta C Charlie 

I want a Python program to print out one list with A,B,C and one with Alfa, Betta, Charlie.

This is what I’ve written:

english2german = open('english2german.txt', 'r') englist = [] gerlist = []  for i, line in enumerate(english2german):     englist[i:], gerlist[i:] = line.split() 

This is making two lists, but will only print out the first letter in each word. How can I make my code to print out the whole word?

Answer 1

You want something like this:

english2german = open('english2german.txt') englist = [] gerlist = []  for line in english2german:     (e, g) = line.split()     englist.append(e)     gerlist.append(g) 

The problem with your code before is that englist[i:] is actually a slice of a list, not just a single index. A string is also iterable, so you were basically stuffing a single letter into several indices. In other words, something like gerlist[0:] = 'alfa' actually results in gerlist = ['a', 'l', 'f', 'a'].