How to extract specific columns from a space separated file in Python?

Question

I\'m trying to process a file from the protein data bank which is separated by spaces (not \\t). I have a .txt file and I want to extract specific rows and, from that rows,

Answer 1

Have a look at the CSV library. https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html The following code should do the trick

>>> import csv
>>> with open('my-file.txt', 'rb') as myfile:
...     spamreader = csv.reader(myfile, delimiter=' ', )
...     for row in spamreader:
...         print row[3]