Question

Not really too sure how to word this question, therefore if you don’t particularly understand it then I can try again.

I have a file called example.txt and I’d like to import this into my Python program. Here I will do some calculations with what it contains and other things that are irrelevant.

Instead of me importing this file, going through it line-by-line and extracting the information I want.. can Python do it instead? As in, if I structure the .txt correctly (whether it be key / value pairs seperated by an equals on each line), is there a current Python ‘way’ where it can handle it all and I work with that?

Answer 1

with open("example.txt") as f:
    for line in f:
        key, value = line.strip().split("=")
        do_something(key,value)

looks like a starting point if I understand you correctly. You need Python 2.6 or 3.x for this.

Another place to look is the csv module that can parse comma-separated value files – and you can tell it to use = as a separator instead. This will abstract away some of the “manual work” in that previous example – but it seems your example doesn’t especially need that kind of abstraction.

Another idea:

with open("example.txt") as f:
    d = dict([line.strip().split("=") for line in f])

Now that’s concise and pythonic 🙂