Reading from text files is an essential operation in Python. Text files are one of the most common ways to store data, and Python provides many ways to read data from them. In this tutorial, we will show you how to get value from a text file using Python.
Steps:
Step 1: Open the Text File
To open a text file in Python, we use the open()
function. This function takes two parameters: the path of the file and the mode in which we want to open the file. If we want to read data from the file, we pass "r"
(read) as the mode.
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file = open("example.txt", "r") |
Step 2: Read the Contents of the Text File
Once we have opened the text file, we can read its contents using the read()
method. This method reads the entire contents of the file and returns them as a single string.
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content = file.read() |
Step 3: Close the Text File
After reading the contents of the text file, we should close the file using the close()
method. This will free up system resources and ensure that the file is properly closed.
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file.close() |
Step 4: Extract Required Data From The Text File Content
Now that we have read the contents of the text file, we can extract the data that we need. This depends on the structure of the text file and the data that we are interested in. For example, if the text file contains a list of names and we want to extract the first name, we could do the following:
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names = content.split(",") first_name = names[0] |
In this example, we are splitting the contents of the file using the comma character as the delimiter. This will give us a list of names, which we can then access using array indexing.
Full Code:
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file = open("example.txt", "r") content = file.read() file.close() names = content.split(",") first_name = names[0] print(first_name) |
Output:
John
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we have shown you how to get value from a text file in Python. We have covered the basic steps of opening the file, reading its contents, closing the file, and extracting the data that we need.
These steps should be enough to get you started with reading data from text files in Python.