Question

when executing on the command line it is supposed to have python3 a4.py apple

the file whose numbers i am trying to sum looks exactly like this

4   14
5

this is what i have gathered so far

import sys
print(sys.argv[1])
fp = open(sys.argv[1])
fileContents = fp.read()
fp.close()
numbers = fileContents
print(numbers)

def map(f,items):
    result = []
    for i in range(0,len(items),1):
        result = result + [f(items[i])]
    return result

a=map(eval,numbers)

def sum(num):
    total = 0
    for i in range(0,len(num),1):
        total = total + i
    return total
print(sum(a))

Answer 1

(I am a bit confused by the “recursion” tag)

How about this?

import sys

with open(sys.argv[1]) as inf:
    total = 0
    for line in inf:
        total += sum(int(i) for i in line.split())

print(total)

Notes:

• this assumes that each line only contains numeric values (in this case integers)
• if your numbers contain float values, use float() rather than int()
• using with automatically closes the file for you when you are done or you encounter an execption.
• this processes the file line-by-line, so it will not be limited by memory issues with huge files (should that ever be a possibility)

Update:

You can shorten this even more with this provided by a helpful comment by J.F.Sebastian below:

with open(sys.argv[1]) as inf:
    print(sum(int(number) for line in inf for number in line.split()))