Converting a string into a list in Python

Question

I have a text document that contains a list of numbers and I want to convert it to a list. Right now I can only get the entire list in the 0th entry of the list, but I want

Answer 1

To convert a Python string into a list use the str.split method:

>>> '1000 2000 3000 4000'.split()
['1000', '2000', '3000', '4000']

split has some options: look them up for advanced uses.

You can also read the file into a list with the readlines() method of a file object - it returns a list of lines. For example, to get a list of integers from that file, you can do:

lst = map(int, open('filename.txt').readlines())

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P.S: See some other methods for doing the same in the comments. Some of those methods are nicer (more Pythonic) than mine