Last time I wrote an article on how to write a list to a file. This time we are going the other way around: How to read data from a file and write it to a list.

The simplest way to append a file to a list is by using the following code:

with open('my_file.txt', 'r') as f:
    my_names = f.readlines()

Let’s see how it works with the following text file.

Let’s print it:

['First line\n', 'Second line\n', 'Third line']

The first two elements end with the newline character (\n).

Let’s use the for loop:

for name in my_names:
    print(name)

This is how the result looks like:

First line

Second line

Third line

They are separated by the newline character. If you want to get rid of it, you can use the strip function.

with open('C:/my_file.txt', 'r') as f:
    my_names = [line.strip() for line in f]

Now, there are no newline characters at the end of the file.

First line
Second line
Third line

Append CSV file to a list

If you are using a CSV file, instead of the text file, the code will be slightly more complicated.

This is the CSV file opened in a text editor:

If you try to use the previous code, you are going to get the following result:

['John,Smith,age,24', 'Alex,Miller,age,53', 'Eric,Williams,age,56']

If that’s what’s you want, then ok, but you may want to create a list of lists.

my_people = []

with open('C:/my_file.csv', 'r') as f:
    my_elements = [line.strip() for line in f]
    for element in my_elements:
        elements = element.split(',')
        my_people.append(elements)

for person in my_people:
    print(person)

Now, you have a beautiful list of lists:

['John', 'Smith', 'age', '24']
['Alex', 'Miller', 'age', '53']
['Eric', 'Williams', 'age', '56']