Reading specific columns from a text file in python

Question

I have a text file which contains a table comprised of numbers e.g:

5 10 6

6 20 1

7 30 4

8 40 3

9 23 1

4 13 6

Answer 1

You can use a zip function with a list comprehension :

with open('ex.txt') as f:
    print zip(*[line.split() for line in f])[1]

result :

('10', '20', '30', '40', '23', '13')