Question

I’m a Python newb, I tried searching if there were other similar questions but it doesn’t seem that there are. I’m really hoping my question isn’t ridiculous, and why I didn’t find others.

I have .txt file with 500 stock symbols that I have to include in my code to create an event matrix. I’m wondering if there is a way that I can somehow import the symbols into my line of code without having to type each individual symbol out. I’m using Python out of terminal if that makes a difference.

Also Running on virtual machine on Ubuntu 12.04

The line of code looks like this.

Symbols = [“”]

also somewhat unrelated to original question an example code shows this.

print ‘‘name’‘ + “reading data”

Do the underlines represent something else and it just shows up like that in .py, it just seems it would run an error when trying it out.

Thank you.

Answer 1

This assumes your file is of the form

AAPL
MSFT
IBM

and so on. And your file is named tickers.txt.

To do it in Pandas do

import pandas as pd
tickers = pd.read_csv('tickers.txt', names=['Tickers'])

This will load the file into a dataframe.

To do it in Numpy do

import numpy as np
tickers = np.loadtxt('ticker.txt', dtype=str)

This will load the file into a numpy array.

The above solutions work, but it’s probably overkill for a simple task like what you’re doing. I’d use vanilla python for this task.

with open('tickers.txt') as f:
    tickers = f.readlines()