Is there a difference between : “file.readlines()”, “list(file)” and “file.read().splitlines(True)”?

Question

What is the difference between :

with open(\"file.txt\", \"r\") as f:
    data = list(f)

Or :

with open(\"file.txt\", \"r\") as         


        

Answer 1

They're all achieving the same goal of returning a list of strings but using separate approaches. f.readlines() is the most Pythonic.

with open("file.txt", "r") as f:
    data = list(f)

f here is a file-like object, which is being iterated over through list, which returns lines in the file.

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with open("file.txt", "r") as f:
    data = f.read().splitlines(True)

f.read() returns a string, which you split on newlines, returning a list of strings.

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with open("file.txt", "r") as f:
    data = f.readlines()

f.readlines() does the same as above, it reads the entire file and splits on newlines.