Question

I’ve spent the last two hours trying to figure this out. Please help I’ve tried Google for the past two hours. No luck. What am I doing wrong?

The contents of codes.txt:

TKF6J-KXP6V-F499V-Q9XPC-7J6TZ;J9YCV-D4TH6-WWWWV-F2RM7-F63XZ;GXKCC-QDT34-3JRY4-TWKHX-R763Z;

myscript.py

import re
from sqlalchemy import *

string = open("codes.txt").readlines()

for item in string:
    set = [item.split(";")]
    print "success"

Why does it print “success” only once? I expect it to print success for the number of items in codes.txt.

Answer 1

readlines() is actually looking for newline characters, and since it doesn’t appear that your string has any, it is only reading one line, and therefore only returning one element (this is what @kayZhu just said, apologies 🙂 ). I think you are looking to split on the semicolon, so you could try this:

In [19]: with open('codes.txt', 'r') as f:
   ....:     contents = f.read().split(';')
   ....:
   ....:

In [20]: contents
Out[20]:
['TKF6J-KXP6V-F499V-Q9XPC-7J6TZ',
 'J9YCV-D4TH6-WWWWV-F2RM7-F63XZ',
 'GXKCC-QDT34-3JRY4-TWKHX-R763Z',
 '']

And then your iteration should work as expected. Also, try to avoid using Python built-in names for your variables (e.g. string – it will only cause heartache down the road 🙂 ).