Question

I’m trying to write a function that will open a .txt file in the shell as a list of list of str.

The file is something like:

TYUIO
GHJKL
BNMCV
ASDFG
XCVBN

And I need my function to return:

[['T', 'Y', 'U', 'I', 'O'], ['G', 'H', 'J', 'K', 'L'], ...]

and so on.

The function I have written almost produces this. It returns:

[['TYUIO'], ['GHJKL'], ...]

and so on. What do I need to change/add to this function to make it return to correct nested list?

This is my function:

board_list = []
for line in board_file:
    items = line.rstrip('\n').split('\t')
    items = [item.strip() for item in items]
    board_list.append(items)

return board_list

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Try using list() and extend().

items = [list(item.strip()) for item in items]
board_list.extend(items)

You can also do it in one line, assuming each line contains a single word. I’m not sure why you are splitting on \t so this might not work for you.

with open("data.txt") as board_file:
    board_list = [list(line) for line in board_file.read().split('\n') if line]