cesco wrote: > I have a file containing four columns of data separated by tabs (\t) > and I'd like to read a specific column from it (say the third). Is > there any simple way to do this in Python?
use the "split" method and plain old indexing: for line in open("file.txt"): columns = line.split("\t") print columns[2] # indexing starts at zero also see the "csv" module, which can read all sorts of comma/semicolon/tab-separated spreadsheet-style files. > I've found quite interesting the linecache module the "linecache" module seems to be quite popular on comp.lang.python these days, but it's designed for a very specific purpose (displaying Python code in tracebacks), and is a really lousy way to read text files in the general case. please unlearn. </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list