Remove everything between a specific character in a txt file

Question

If I have a.txt file with this content:

1020,"Balance",+10000 
1030,"Something",-5000

How do I remove whats in the middle, so that the only thing im left with is

1020,+10000
1030,-5000

Answer 1

If it's always in the same index:

with open('yourfile.txt', 'r') as f:
    lines = f.readlines()

    output = []

    for line in lines:
        temp = line.split(",")
        output.append(temp[0])
        output.append(temp[2])
    
   print(output)

Answer 2

I would approach it with a regex:

import re

string = "1030,\"Something\",-5000"
stripped = re.sub("[\"].*[\"]", "", string)
print stripped

This prints 1030,,-5000 from there you can remove one of the commas.

Answer 3

You could import the data into a dataframe using Pandas and then delete the second column like this.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('example.txt', header=None)

del df[1]
print(df)

Answer 4

You can use csv module for this task:

import csv

def removeColumn(fn1,fn2,idx=1):
    with open(fn1,"r") as csvfile1:
        reader = csv.reader(csvfile1)
        
        with open(fn2,"w") as csvfile2:
            writer = csv.writer(csvfile2)
            for row in reader:
                writer.write(row[:idx] + row[:idx+1])