Create an array from data in a table using Python

Question

I want to get data from a table in a text file into a python array. The text file that I am using as an input has 7 columns and 31 rows. Here is an example of the first two rows:

10672   34.332875   5.360831    0.00004035881220    0.00000515052523    4.52E-07    6.5E-07

12709   40.837833   19.429158   0.00012010938453    -0.00000506426720   7.76E-06    2.9E-07

The code that I have tried to write isn't working as it is not reading one line at a time when it goes through the for loop.

data = []
f = open('hyadeserr.txt', 'r')
while True:
    eof = "no"
    array = []
for i in range(7):
    line = f.readline()
    word = line.split()
    if len(word) == 0:
        eof = "yes"
    else:
        array.append(float(word[0]))
        print array
if eof == "yes": break
data.append(array)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

A file with space-separated values is just a dialect of the classic comma-separated values (CSV) file where the delimiter is a space ( ), followed by more spaces, which can be ignored.

Happily, Python comes with a csv.reader class that understands dialect s.

You should use this:

Example:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import csv

csv.register_dialect('ssv', delimiter=' ', skipinitialspace=True)

data = []
with open('hyadeserr.txt', 'r') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f, 'ssv')
    for row in reader:
        floats = [float(column) for column in row]
        data.append(floats)

print data

Answer 2

If you don't want to use cvs here, since you don't really need it:

data = []
with open("hyadeserr.txt") as file:
    for line in file:
        data.append([float(f) for f in line.strip().split()])

Or, if you know for sure that the only extra chars are spaces and line ending \\n , you can turn the last line into:

data.append([float(f) for f in line[:-1].split()])