CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringlistimporttext-files
find_all
find_all

Reputation: 197

Converting Python exported list .txt to regular Python list

I am trying to convert a .txt file to regular Python list. I have done this before, but the previous situations have involved manually constructed files. I am currently trying to process a .txt file that was composed by another Python script that wrote a list into said .txt file. I am not sure why these formats are being perceived as different by Python

Here is what I mean:

The first .txt looked like:

(Let's call it x.txt)

I like dogs
Go home 
This is the greatest Ice Cream ever

Now if I do:

f = open('x.txt', encoding = "utf8")

z = f.readlines()

print(z)

I get

['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

This is exactly what I want ^

My current .txt file looks like:

(Let's call it y.txt)

['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

Now if I do:

f = open('y.txt', encoding = "utf8")

z = f.readlines()

print(z)

I get a bizarre output that looks like:

['[\'I like dogs. \', \'Go home\', \'This is the greatest Ice Cream 
ever\',]]

I thought double brackets only existed really in Pandas? Where am I going wrong here? How can I get a regular list format output.

Note: To provide some context, I am trying to feed this list into some text cleaning script. When I try to feed that second output into it, I don't get an error, but it turns the list of strings into one long string in a list like: ['IlikedogsGohomeThisisthegreatestIceCreamever']

Upvotes: 0

Views: 83

Answers (3)

Underoos
Underoos

Reputation: 5180

If there is only one line that contains your list as a string and it is the first line, I would suggest you to try this

fil = open('y.txt', 'r', encoding="utf-8")
lis = eval(fil.readlines()[0])

now you should be able to use list - lis

Let me know if that worked.

Upvotes: 0

Arkistarvh Kltzuonstev
Arkistarvh Kltzuonstev

Reputation: 6920

If your 'y.txt' file contains this ['I like dogs', 'Go home', 'This is the greatest Ice Cream ever'] without string formatting and after reading the text lines you want to get the list assigned to some variable, try this :

from ast import literal_eval
with open('y.txt', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f:
    b = f.readlines()
    print(b)    # OUTPUT - ["['I like dogs','Go home','This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']"]
    l = literal_eval(b[0])
    print(l)    # OUTPUT - ['I like dogs', 'Go home', 'This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

There is one restriction to using the above code - this will work only if the text file contains a single list. If it contains multiple list inside 'y.txt', try this :

from ast import literal_eval
with open('y.txt', 'r', encoding = 'utf-8') as f:
    b = f.readlines()
    l = [literal_eval(k.strip()) for k in b]

Upvotes: 1

Divyanshu Srivastava
Divyanshu Srivastava

Reputation: 1507

List can be extracted directly from y.txt as 

>>> with open('y.txt', 'r') as file:
...     line = file.readlines()[0].split("'")[1::2]
... 
>>> line
['I like dogs', 'Go home', 'This is the greatest Ice Cream ever']

Upvotes: 0

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