Reading files from a text file into a list of list

Question

I have a text file containing:

name: Joe
score: 77
class: Jupiter

name: Jess
score: 87
class: Neptune

.
.
.

and I'm using python to read in the file content into two different list. The format i wanted is:

list1 = [['Joe',77],['Jess',87]]
list2 = [['Joe','Jupiter'],['Jess','Neptune']]

and i tried writing:

filename = open("student.txt","r")
studFile = filename
list1 = []
list2 = []

for line in studFile:
    value = line.strip().split(": ")
    if "name" in line:
        list1.append(value[1])
        list2.append(value[1])
    if "score" in line:
        list1.append(int(value[1]))
    if "class" in line:
        list2.append(value[1])

I can feel as in I'm reading in the file content in a rather strange way with the ( if "name" ) clause. Is there a better way of doing this?

Answer 1

I would go for a solution using dicts, makes it easier to access all the data later on. In this example I use 'name' as key.

list1 = []
tmp_dict = {}
with open('student.txt','r') as file:
    for line in file:
        value = line.strip().split(': ')
        if 'name' in line:
            name = value[1]
            tmp_dict[name] = {}
        if 'score' in line:
            tmp_dict[name]['score'] = int(value[1])
        if 'class' in line:
            tmp_dict[name]['class'] = value[1]
            list1.append(tmp_dict)
            tmp_dict = {}
print(list1)

Output:

[{'Joe': {'score': 77, 'class': 'Jupiter'}}, {'Jess': {'score': 87, 'class': 'Neptune'}}]

Or to fix your original code to make it work as expected:

list1 = []
list2 = []

name = None
with open('student.txt','r') as file:
    for line in file:
        value = line.strip().split(': ')
        if 'name' in line:
            name = value[1]
        if 'score' in line:
            list1.append([name, int(value[1])])
        if 'class' in line:
            list2.append([name, value[1]])

print(list1)
print(list2)

Output:

[['Joe', 77], ['Jess', 87]]
[['Joe', 'Jupiter'], ['Jess', 'Neptune']]