Question

There are two sentnecs in “test.txt”

sentence1 = A sentence is a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words.

sentence2 = A sentence can also be defined in orthographic terms alone.

count_line = 0
for line in open('C:/Users/Desktop/test.txt'):
    count_line = count_line +1
    fields = line.rstrip('\n').split('\t')
    ##print count_line, fields
    file = open('C:/Users/Desktop/test_words.txt', 'w+')
    count_word = 0
    for words in fields:
        wordsplit = words.split()
        for word in wordsplit:
             count_word = count_word + 1
             print count_word, word
             file.write(str(count_word) + " " + word + '\n')
        file.close()

My result in “test_words.txt” showed only the words from second sentence:

1 A 
2 sentence
3 can
4 also
5 be
6 defined
7 in
8 orthographic
9 terms
10 alone.

How to also write the words from the first sentence in and follow by the words in second sentence “test_words.txt” ?

Any suggestion?

Answer 1

The reason this is happening is because when you open the file for the second time, you dont preserve the original text inside it. When you open a file and write to it in Python, you basically overwrite its contents unless you store them in a variable and re-write them.

Try this code:

count_line = 0
for n, line in enumerate(open('test.txt')):
    count_line = count_line +1
    fields = line.rstrip('\n').split('\t')
    ##print count_line, fields
    already_text = open('test_words.txt').read() if n > 0 else ''
    file = open('test_words.txt', 'w+')
    count_word = 0
    file.write(already_text)
    for words in fields:
        wordsplit = words.split()
        for word in wordsplit:
             count_word = count_word + 1
             print count_word, word
             file.write(str(count_word) + " " + word + '\n')
        file.close()

Here’s the output when i run it:

1 A
2 sentence
3 is
4 a
5 grammatical
6 unit
7 consisting
8 of
9 one
10 or
11 more
12 words.
1 A
2 sentence
3 can
4 also
5 be
6 defined
7 in
8 orthographic
9 terms
10 alone.

Here’s code without enumerate():

count_line = 0
n = 0
for line in open('test.txt'):
    count_line = count_line +1
    fields = line.rstrip('\n').split('\t')
    ##print count_line, fields
    already_text = open('test_words.txt').read() if n > 0 else ''
    file = open('test_words.txt', 'w+')
    count_word = 0
    file.write(already_text)
    for words in fields:
        wordsplit = words.split()
        for word in wordsplit:
             count_word = count_word + 1
             print count_word, word
             file.write(str(count_word) + " " + word + '\n')
        file.close()
    n += 1