Ytukyg

I'm new to Python I do not understand why my code fails to load the first line. Could someone please take a look?

My code is:

f = open("test.txt")

line = f.readline()



joined=



while line:

    line=f.readline().split()

    for x in line:

        joined.append(line)



f.close()



print(joined)

"test.txt" file looks like this:

This is the 1st line !

This is the 2nd line .

This is the 3rd line ?

This is the 4th line

This is the 5th line .

I get this (first line is missing, also duplicate entries):

[['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.']]

But desired output is:

[['This', 'is', 'the', '1st', 'line', '!'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'],  ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.']]

Also, is there a way to lowercase all characters in all of the lists?

You can use a list comprehension that iterates through lines splitting on space:

with open('test.txt') as f:

    print([x.split() for x in f])



# [['This', 'is', 'the', '1st', 'line', '!'], 

#  ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'],

#  ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'],

#  ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'],

#  ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.']]

To make all lower case:

print([x.lower().split() for x in f])



# [['this', 'is', 'the', '1st', 'line', '!'],

#  ['this', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'],

#  ['this', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'],

#  ['this', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'],

#  ['this', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.']]

The reason why you are not getting the first line is because you do .readline() outside loop and never used it. You immediately replace that with another .readline() in the loop leaving you with lines from second position onwards.

You're discarding the value returned by the first readline(), which is why the first line of your file is missing in the output. You can iterate over the file object as an iterator instead:

joined = 

for line in f:

    joined.append(line.split())

print(joined)

To answer your additional question how to lowercase all characters:

str.lower()

gives you the lowercase of a string. So to complete the above answer:

with open('test.txt') as f:

print([x.split().lower() for x in f])

This should do it.

There are a couple issues here. The first is that the first line is not appended to your joined list because it is defined and then overwritten at the beginning of the while loop on the first iteration before it can be appended to the joined list.

The second is that you write:

for x in line:

    joined.append(line)

Which adds the whole line to joined for each element in line. So the second lines gets appended 6 times because it contains 6 elements. I think you meant to append x to joined, but that will give you all the words in a single list rather than nested lists as desired. Since each line is already split into a list of individual words, there is no need for this inner loop.

You can write your code more concisely with:

with open("test.txt", "r") as f:

    joined = [line.split() for line in f.readlines()]

Result:

[['This', 'is', 'the', '1st', 'line', '!'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '2nd', 'line', '.'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '3rd', 'line', '?'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '4th', 'line'], ['This', 'is', 'the', '5th', 'line', '.']]