Spacing Two Things On The Same Line Then Writing To File

Question

I am trying to write two things from two different files on the same line of a different file(That is there are 3 files being used. 2 that already have items and a new one )

 fin=open("/Users/battledrum/Desktop/review2.txt")
 fin1=open("/Users/battledrum/Desktop/review3.txt")

 fout=open("/Users/battledrum/Desktop/HeightVStime.txt","w")

 a=list()

 for i in range(35):
      fout.write(fin.read()+'\t'+fin1.read())


print(len(a))

this is the result i want to see in the new file:

1.34, 1.54

1.80, 1.39

1.25 , 1.68

1.69 , 1.83

Answer 1

Many things wrong with this:

• file.read() gets the entire contents of a file, so you are writing (the entire first file) + tab + (the entire second file) where you want to read line by line.

• you never append to a , so len(a) will always be 0.

• It isn't exactly clear what you want in a - the line-by-line file contents?

I think you want something more like

HEIGHT_FILE = "/Users/battledrum/Desktop/review2.txt"
TIME_FILE   = "/Users/battledrum/Desktop/review3.txt"
OUTPUT_FILE = "/Users/battledrum/Desktop/HeightVStime.txt"

def main():
    # load data pairs
    with open(HEIGHT_FILE) as hf, open(TIME_FILE) as tf:
        hts = [(height.strip(), time.strip()) for height,time in zip(hf, tf)]
    # write output
    with open(OUTPUT_FILE, "w") as outf:
        lines = ("{}\t{}".format(h, t) for h,t in hts)
        outf.write("\n".join(lines))
    print("{} lines written".format(len(hts)))

if __name__=="__main__":
    main()

Answer 2

Rather than assuming a certain number of lines in each file, how about something like:

with open("/Users/battledrum/Desktop/HeightVStime.txt","w") as fout:
    with open("/Users/battledrum/Desktop/review2.txt") as fin1:
        with open("/Users/battledrum/Desktop/review3.txt") as fin2:
            fout.writelines([(', '.join((x.rstrip('\n'),y))) for x,y in zip(fin1,fin2)])

zip will combine lines between fin1 and fin2 , since we can treat each file object as an iterable and will throw away the remaining lines if one of the files is longer than the other.

Answer 3

assuming the files are the same length

with open(fin) as f1:
    with open(fin1) as f2:
        num1 = [l.strip() for l in f1.readlines()]
        num2 = [l.strip() for l in f2.readlines()]


with open(fout,'w+') as out:
    for i in range(0,len(num1)):
        out.write(','.join([num1[i], num2[i]])+'\n')