splitting python 1d array into 2d array by comma

Question

I'm relatively new to python (experience in c#), and I have a list in a text file that I dumped into a list using;

with open(fname) as f:
    content = f.readlines()
content = [x.strip() for x in content] 

The thing is, every line is in the form XXXXX, XXXXX (with varying lengths of XXXXX), and I want to convert f into a 2-dimensional array with things in the line before the comma in the first dimension and everything after in the second.

What's the best practice for doing something like that?

Answer 1

Just use .split(',') :

From the documentation, we can see that the string method .split will:

Return a list of the words in the string, using sep as the delimiter string.

So to give an example, taking the string :

s = "abcd, efgh"

then we can do:

s.split(', ')

to get a list :

['abcd', 'efgh']

So for your application, just throw it in the list-comprehension :

with open(fname) as f:
    content = f.readlines()
content = [x.strip().split(', ') for x in content]