Writing a list to a file with Python

Question

Is this the cleanest way to write a list to a file, since writelines() doesn\'t insert newline characters?

file.writelines([\"%s\\n\" % item  fo         


        

Answer 1

You can use a loop:

with open('your_file.txt', 'w') as f:
    for item in my_list:
        f.write("%s\n" % item)

In Python 2, you can also use

with open('your_file.txt', 'w') as f:
    for item in my_list:
        print >> f, item

If you're keen on a single function call, at least remove the square brackets [], so that the strings to be printed get made one at a time (a genexp rather than a listcomp) -- no reason to take up all the memory required to materialize the whole list of strings.

Answer 2

Redirecting stdout to a file might also be useful for this purpose:

from contextlib import redirect_stdout
with open('test.txt', 'w') as f:
  with redirect_stdout(f):
     for i in range(mylst.size):
        print(mylst[i])

Answer 3

The simpler way is:

with open("outfile", "w") as outfile:
    outfile.write("\n".join(itemlist))

You could ensure that all items in item list are strings using a generator expression:

with open("outfile", "w") as outfile:
    outfile.write("\n".join(str(item) for item in itemlist))

Remember that all itemlist list need to be in memory, so, take care about the memory consumption.

Answer 4

Yet another way. Serialize to json using simplejson (included as json in python 2.6):

>>> import simplejson
>>> f = open('output.txt', 'w')
>>> simplejson.dump([1,2,3,4], f)
>>> f.close()

If you examine output.txt:

[1, 2, 3, 4]

This is useful because the syntax is pythonic, it's human readable, and it can be read by other programs in other languages.

Answer 5

Because i'm lazy....

import json
a = [1,2,3]
with open('test.txt', 'w') as f:
    f.write(json.dumps(a))

#Now read the file back into a Python list object
with open('test.txt', 'r') as f:
    a = json.loads(f.read())

Answer 6

Let avg be the list, then:

In [29]: a = n.array((avg))
In [31]: a.tofile('avgpoints.dat',sep='\n',dtype = '%f')

You can use %e or %s depending on your requirement.