Reading from a plain text file

Question

Say I have the following in a text file:

car
apple
bike
book

How can I read it and put them into a dictionary

Answer 1

Reading them into a list is trivially done with readlines():

f = open('your-file.dat')
yourList = f.readlines()

If you need the newlines stripped out you can use ars' method, or do:

yourList = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in f]

If you want a dictionary with keys from 1 to the length of the list, the first way that comes to mind is to make the list as above and then do:

yourDict = dict(zip(xrange(1, len(yourList)+1), yourList))

Answer 2

This is covered pretty thoroughly in the Python tutorial.

lines = open('filename.txt', 'r').readlines()

Answer 3

You can use the file with with like this. This is called a context manager and automatically closes the file at the end of the indented block

with open('data.txt') as f:
    words = f.readlines()

If you want to do it without a context manager, you should close the file yourself

f = open('data.txt')
words = f.readlines()
f.close()

Otherwise the file remains open at least as long as f is still in scope

Answer 4

words = []
for word in open('words.txt'):
    words.append(word.rstrip('\n'))

The words list will contain the words in your file. strip removes the newline characters.