Segment a txt file column to lists

Question

I am have text file with multiple columns and separated by commas.

I am trying to read it and put each column into it's own separate list but I can't seem to do it.

What I've done so far:

with open(file, 'r') as file_test:
    file_lines = file_test.readlines()
    file_strip = [line.strip("\n") for line in file_lines]

#I've split big list into separate lists within `file_strip`
    file_columns= [file_strip [i:i + 1] for i in range(0, len(file_strip ), 1)][2:]

So now my data is as follows:

[['22AUG18 000000, 22AUG18 000149, 5.722, UOS2'], ['22JUL18 012703, 22JUL18 013810, 52.2811, UOS2']]

I don't know how to get rid of the ' in the beginning and end of each list too

I want the first element in each list to be in List1 , 2nd element in each list to be in List2 etc...

Answer 1

Why not use the csv module? It was designed to do what you want to do!

import csv

with open(file, 'r') as file_test:
    csv_test = csv.reader(file_test)
    for row in csv_test:
         print(row)

Will print

['22AUG18 000000', '22AUG18 000149', '5.722', 'UOS2']
['22JUL18 012703', '22JUL18 013810', '52.2811', 'UOS2']

If you want to separate that in lists you can zip() it:

with open(file, 'r') as file_test:
    csv_test = csv.reader(file_test)
    list1, list2, list3, list4 = zip(*csv_test)