Add each character from each line of a text file, to a list in Python

Question

So I want to read each character (separated by spaces) of each line of a text file and add them to a seperate index of a list for each line.

file = open("theTextFile.txt", 'r+')
pal = []

words = file.split(' ')
pal.append(words)

print(pal)
split_line(file)

The text file has a single character separated by a space for each line. The editor wouldn't allow for my punctuation from the text file, but below is an example of what it looks like.

rotor

racec

Answer 1

Maybe you want like this?

words = []
with open('theTextFile.txt', 'r') as fp:
    words = sum([l.strip().split(' ') for l in fp], [])
print(words)

Answer 2

This is what I did to solve my issue:

lines = open('theTextFile.txt','r')

secondList = []
for line in lines:
    line = line.split()
    secondList.append(line)