How can I read numbers in Python from a custom file

Question

Hey all, pretty straightforward question. I basically want to read a certain set of numbers from a file into an array. In my case, a 2-dimensional array to be precise.

The following are the contents of the file:

A line containing height and weight attributes.

Height attributes containing width attributes which are just integers separated by white space.

Check out the following example:

4 3
1 2 3 4
2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9

How do I go about doing this? All help appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi, good question.

Let us first assume that you do not have any extra whitespaces present. If this is the case then check out the following piece of code:

with open('file') as f:
    w, h = [int(x) for x in next(f).split()] # read first line
    array = []
    for line in f: # read rest of lines
        array.append([int(x) for x in line.split()])

However, this can be further simplified and compressed. That last for loop can be put into a nested list, right?

Check it out here:

with open('file') as f:
    w, h = [int(x) for x in next(f).split()]
    array = [[int(x) for x in line.split()] for line in f]

This should solve your problem, let me know if you need anything else!