Question

So like the title says im starting to learn some python and im having trouble picking up on this technique. What I need to accomplish is to read in some numbers and store them in a list. The text file looks like the following:

0 0 3 50

50 100 4 20

Basically these are coordinates and directions to be used for python’s turtle to make shapes. I got that part down the only problem is getting them in a correct format. So what I can not figure out is how to get those numbers from the file into [ [0, 0, 3, 50], [50, 100, 4, 20] ]
A list, with each four coordinates being a list in that one big list.

Heres my attempt but it as I said I need some help – thank you.

polyShape=[]
infile = open(name,"r")
num = int(infile.readline(2))
while num != "":
    polyShape.append(num)
    num = int(infile.readline(2))
infile.close()

Answer 1

with open('data.txt') as f:
    polyShape = []
    for line in f:
        line = line.split() # to deal with blank 
        if line:            # lines (ie skip them)
            line = [int(i) for i in line]
            polyShape.append(line)

will give you

[[0, 0, 3, 50], [50, 100, 4, 20]]

This will work with a file that contains blank lines (or not).

Using the with construct will close the file for you automatically when you are done, or an exception is encountered.