Related
Let's say I have a text file full of nicknames. How can I delete a specific nickname from this file, using Python?
First, open the file and get all your lines from the file. Then reopen the file in write mode and write your lines back, except for the line you want to delete:
with open("yourfile.txt", "r") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
with open("yourfile.txt", "w") as f:
for line in lines:
if line.strip("\n") != "nickname_to_delete":
f.write(line)
You need to strip("\n") the newline character in the comparison because if your file doesn't end with a newline character the very last line won't either.
Solution to this problem with only a single open:
with open("target.txt", "r+") as f:
d = f.readlines()
f.seek(0)
for i in d:
if i != "line you want to remove...":
f.write(i)
f.truncate()
This solution opens the file in r/w mode ("r+") and makes use of seek to reset the f-pointer then truncate to remove everything after the last write.
The best and fastest option, rather than storing everything in a list and re-opening the file to write it, is in my opinion to re-write the file elsewhere.
with open("yourfile.txt", "r") as file_input:
with open("newfile.txt", "w") as output:
for line in file_input:
if line.strip("\n") != "nickname_to_delete":
output.write(line)
That's it! In one loop and one only you can do the same thing. It will be much faster.
This is a "fork" from #Lother's answer (which I believe that should be considered the right answer).
For a file like this:
$ cat file.txt
1: october rust
2: november rain
3: december snow
This fork from Lother's solution works fine:
#!/usr/bin/python3.4
with open("file.txt","r+") as f:
new_f = f.readlines()
f.seek(0)
for line in new_f:
if "snow" not in line:
f.write(line)
f.truncate()
Improvements:
with open, which discard the usage of f.close()
more clearer if/else for evaluating if string is not present in the current line
The issue with reading lines in first pass and making changes (deleting specific lines) in the second pass is that if you file sizes are huge, you will run out of RAM. Instead, a better approach is to read lines, one by one, and write them into a separate file, eliminating the ones you don't need. I have run this approach with files as big as 12-50 GB, and the RAM usage remains almost constant. Only CPU cycles show processing in progress.
I liked the fileinput approach as explained in this answer:
Deleting a line from a text file (python)
Say for example I have a file which has empty lines in it and I want to remove empty lines, here's how I solved it:
import fileinput
import sys
for line_number, line in enumerate(fileinput.input('file1.txt', inplace=1)):
if len(line) > 1:
sys.stdout.write(line)
Note: The empty lines in my case had length 1
If you use Linux, you can try the following approach.
Suppose you have a text file named animal.txt:
$ cat animal.txt
dog
pig
cat
monkey
elephant
Delete the first line:
>>> import subprocess
>>> subprocess.call(['sed','-i','/.*dog.*/d','animal.txt'])
then
$ cat animal.txt
pig
cat
monkey
elephant
Probably, you already got a correct answer, but here is mine.
Instead of using a list to collect unfiltered data (what readlines() method does), I use two files. One is for hold a main data, and the second is for filtering the data when you delete a specific string. Here is a code:
main_file = open('data_base.txt').read() # your main dataBase file
filter_file = open('filter_base.txt', 'w')
filter_file.write(main_file)
filter_file.close()
main_file = open('data_base.txt', 'w')
for line in open('filter_base'):
if 'your data to delete' not in line: # remove a specific string
main_file.write(line) # put all strings back to your db except deleted
else: pass
main_file.close()
Hope you will find this useful! :)
I think if you read the file into a list, then do the you can iterate over the list to look for the nickname you want to get rid of. You can do it much efficiently without creating additional files, but you'll have to write the result back to the source file.
Here's how I might do this:
import, os, csv # and other imports you need
nicknames_to_delete = ['Nick', 'Stephen', 'Mark']
I'm assuming nicknames.csv contains data like:
Nick
Maria
James
Chris
Mario
Stephen
Isabella
Ahmed
Julia
Mark
...
Then load the file into the list:
nicknames = None
with open("nicknames.csv") as sourceFile:
nicknames = sourceFile.read().splitlines()
Next, iterate over to list to match your inputs to delete:
for nick in nicknames_to_delete:
try:
if nick in nicknames:
nicknames.pop(nicknames.index(nick))
else:
print(nick + " is not found in the file")
except ValueError:
pass
Lastly, write the result back to file:
with open("nicknames.csv", "a") as nicknamesFile:
nicknamesFile.seek(0)
nicknamesFile.truncate()
nicknamesWriter = csv.writer(nicknamesFile)
for name in nicknames:
nicknamesWriter.writeRow([str(name)])
nicknamesFile.close()
In general, you can't; you have to write the whole file again (at least from the point of change to the end).
In some specific cases you can do better than this -
if all your data elements are the same length and in no specific order, and you know the offset of the one you want to get rid of, you could copy the last item over the one to be deleted and truncate the file before the last item;
or you could just overwrite the data chunk with a 'this is bad data, skip it' value or keep a 'this item has been deleted' flag in your saved data elements such that you can mark it deleted without otherwise modifying the file.
This is probably overkill for short documents (anything under 100 KB?).
I like this method using fileinput and the 'inplace' method:
import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input(fname, inplace =1):
line = line.strip()
if not 'UnwantedWord' in line:
print(line)
It's a little less wordy than the other answers and is fast enough for
Save the file lines in a list, then remove of the list the line you want to delete and write the remain lines to a new file
with open("file_name.txt", "r") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
lines.remove("Line you want to delete\n")
with open("new_file.txt", "w") as new_f:
for line in lines:
new_f.write(line)
here's some other method to remove a/some line(s) from a file:
src_file = zzzz.txt
f = open(src_file, "r")
contents = f.readlines()
f.close()
contents.pop(idx) # remove the line item from list, by line number, starts from 0
f = open(src_file, "w")
contents = "".join(contents)
f.write(contents)
f.close()
You can use the re library
Assuming that you are able to load your full txt-file. You then define a list of unwanted nicknames and then substitute them with an empty string "".
# Delete unwanted characters
import re
# Read, then decode for py2 compat.
path_to_file = 'data/nicknames.txt'
text = open(path_to_file, 'rb').read().decode(encoding='utf-8')
# Define unwanted nicknames and substitute them
unwanted_nickname_list = ['SourDough']
text = re.sub("|".join(unwanted_nickname_list), "", text)
Do you want to remove a specific line from file so use this snippet short and simple code you can easily remove any line with sentence or prefix(Symbol).
with open("file_name.txt", "r") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
with open("new_file.txt", "w") as new_f:
for line in lines:
if not line.startswith("write any sentence or symbol to remove line"):
new_f.write(line)
To delete a specific line of a file by its line number:
Replace variables filename and line_to_delete with the name of your file and the line number you want to delete.
filename = 'foo.txt'
line_to_delete = 3
initial_line = 1
file_lines = {}
with open(filename) as f:
content = f.readlines()
for line in content:
file_lines[initial_line] = line.strip()
initial_line += 1
f = open(filename, "w")
for line_number, line_content in file_lines.items():
if line_number != line_to_delete:
f.write('{}\n'.format(line_content))
f.close()
print('Deleted line: {}'.format(line_to_delete))
Example output:
Deleted line: 3
Take the contents of the file, split it by newline into a tuple. Then, access your tuple's line number, join your result tuple, and overwrite to the file.
I have the following problem. I am supposed to open a CSV file (its an excel table) and read it without using any library.
I tried already a lot and have now the first row in a tuple and this in a list. But only the first line. The header. But no other row.
This is what I have so far.
with open(path, 'r+') as file:
results=[]
text = file.readline()
while text != '':
for line in text.split('\n'):
a=line.split(',')
b=tuple(a)
results.append(b)
return results
The output should: be every line in a tuple and all the tuples in a list.
My question is now, how can I read the other lines in python?
I am really sorry, I am new to programming all together and so I have a real hard time finding my mistake.
Thank you very much in advance for helping me out!
This problem was many times on Stackoverflow so you should find working code.
But much better is to use module csv for this.
You have wrong indentation and you use return results after reading first line so it exits function and it never try read other lines.
But after changing this there are still other problems so it still will not read next lines.
You use readline() so you read only first line and your loop will works all time with the same line - and maybe it will never ends because you never set text = ''
You should use read() to get all text which later you split to lines using split("\n") or you could use readlines() to get all lines as list and then you don't need split(). OR you can use for line in file: In all situations you don't need while
def read_csv(path):
with open(path, 'r+') as file:
results = []
text = file.read()
for line in text.split('\n'):
items = line.split(',')
results.append(tuple(items))
# after for-loop
return results
def read_csv(path):
with open(path, 'r+') as file:
results = []
lines = file.readlines()
for line in lines:
line = line.rstrip('\n') # remove `\n` at the end of line
items = line.split(',')
results.append(tuple(items))
# after for-loop
return results
def read_csv(path):
with open(path, 'r+') as file:
results = []
for line in file:
line = line.rstrip('\n') # remove `\n` at the end of line
items = line.split(',')
results.append(tuple(items))
# after for-loop
return results
All this version will not work correctly if you will '\n' or , inside item which shouldn't be treated as end of row or as separtor between items. These items will be in " " which also can make problem to remove them. All these problem you can resolve using standard module csv.
Your code is pretty well and you are near goal:
with open(path, 'r+') as file:
results=[]
text = file.read()
#while text != '':
for line in text.split('\n'):
a=line.split(',')
b=tuple(a)
results.append(b)
return results
Your Code:
with open(path, 'r+') as file:
results=[]
text = file.readline()
while text != '':
for line in text.split('\n'):
a=line.split(',')
b=tuple(a)
results.append(b)
return results
So enjoy learning :)
One caveat is that the csv may not end with a blank line as this would result in an ugly tuple at the end of the list like ('',) (Which looks like a smiley)
To prevent this you have to check for empty lines: if line != '': after the for will do the trick.
Let's say I have a text file full of nicknames. How can I delete a specific nickname from this file, using Python?
First, open the file and get all your lines from the file. Then reopen the file in write mode and write your lines back, except for the line you want to delete:
with open("yourfile.txt", "r") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
with open("yourfile.txt", "w") as f:
for line in lines:
if line.strip("\n") != "nickname_to_delete":
f.write(line)
You need to strip("\n") the newline character in the comparison because if your file doesn't end with a newline character the very last line won't either.
Solution to this problem with only a single open:
with open("target.txt", "r+") as f:
d = f.readlines()
f.seek(0)
for i in d:
if i != "line you want to remove...":
f.write(i)
f.truncate()
This solution opens the file in r/w mode ("r+") and makes use of seek to reset the f-pointer then truncate to remove everything after the last write.
The best and fastest option, rather than storing everything in a list and re-opening the file to write it, is in my opinion to re-write the file elsewhere.
with open("yourfile.txt", "r") as file_input:
with open("newfile.txt", "w") as output:
for line in file_input:
if line.strip("\n") != "nickname_to_delete":
output.write(line)
That's it! In one loop and one only you can do the same thing. It will be much faster.
This is a "fork" from #Lother's answer (which I believe that should be considered the right answer).
For a file like this:
$ cat file.txt
1: october rust
2: november rain
3: december snow
This fork from Lother's solution works fine:
#!/usr/bin/python3.4
with open("file.txt","r+") as f:
new_f = f.readlines()
f.seek(0)
for line in new_f:
if "snow" not in line:
f.write(line)
f.truncate()
Improvements:
with open, which discard the usage of f.close()
more clearer if/else for evaluating if string is not present in the current line
The issue with reading lines in first pass and making changes (deleting specific lines) in the second pass is that if you file sizes are huge, you will run out of RAM. Instead, a better approach is to read lines, one by one, and write them into a separate file, eliminating the ones you don't need. I have run this approach with files as big as 12-50 GB, and the RAM usage remains almost constant. Only CPU cycles show processing in progress.
I liked the fileinput approach as explained in this answer:
Deleting a line from a text file (python)
Say for example I have a file which has empty lines in it and I want to remove empty lines, here's how I solved it:
import fileinput
import sys
for line_number, line in enumerate(fileinput.input('file1.txt', inplace=1)):
if len(line) > 1:
sys.stdout.write(line)
Note: The empty lines in my case had length 1
If you use Linux, you can try the following approach.
Suppose you have a text file named animal.txt:
$ cat animal.txt
dog
pig
cat
monkey
elephant
Delete the first line:
>>> import subprocess
>>> subprocess.call(['sed','-i','/.*dog.*/d','animal.txt'])
then
$ cat animal.txt
pig
cat
monkey
elephant
Probably, you already got a correct answer, but here is mine.
Instead of using a list to collect unfiltered data (what readlines() method does), I use two files. One is for hold a main data, and the second is for filtering the data when you delete a specific string. Here is a code:
main_file = open('data_base.txt').read() # your main dataBase file
filter_file = open('filter_base.txt', 'w')
filter_file.write(main_file)
filter_file.close()
main_file = open('data_base.txt', 'w')
for line in open('filter_base'):
if 'your data to delete' not in line: # remove a specific string
main_file.write(line) # put all strings back to your db except deleted
else: pass
main_file.close()
Hope you will find this useful! :)
I think if you read the file into a list, then do the you can iterate over the list to look for the nickname you want to get rid of. You can do it much efficiently without creating additional files, but you'll have to write the result back to the source file.
Here's how I might do this:
import, os, csv # and other imports you need
nicknames_to_delete = ['Nick', 'Stephen', 'Mark']
I'm assuming nicknames.csv contains data like:
Nick
Maria
James
Chris
Mario
Stephen
Isabella
Ahmed
Julia
Mark
...
Then load the file into the list:
nicknames = None
with open("nicknames.csv") as sourceFile:
nicknames = sourceFile.read().splitlines()
Next, iterate over to list to match your inputs to delete:
for nick in nicknames_to_delete:
try:
if nick in nicknames:
nicknames.pop(nicknames.index(nick))
else:
print(nick + " is not found in the file")
except ValueError:
pass
Lastly, write the result back to file:
with open("nicknames.csv", "a") as nicknamesFile:
nicknamesFile.seek(0)
nicknamesFile.truncate()
nicknamesWriter = csv.writer(nicknamesFile)
for name in nicknames:
nicknamesWriter.writeRow([str(name)])
nicknamesFile.close()
In general, you can't; you have to write the whole file again (at least from the point of change to the end).
In some specific cases you can do better than this -
if all your data elements are the same length and in no specific order, and you know the offset of the one you want to get rid of, you could copy the last item over the one to be deleted and truncate the file before the last item;
or you could just overwrite the data chunk with a 'this is bad data, skip it' value or keep a 'this item has been deleted' flag in your saved data elements such that you can mark it deleted without otherwise modifying the file.
This is probably overkill for short documents (anything under 100 KB?).
I like this method using fileinput and the 'inplace' method:
import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input(fname, inplace =1):
line = line.strip()
if not 'UnwantedWord' in line:
print(line)
It's a little less wordy than the other answers and is fast enough for
Save the file lines in a list, then remove of the list the line you want to delete and write the remain lines to a new file
with open("file_name.txt", "r") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
lines.remove("Line you want to delete\n")
with open("new_file.txt", "w") as new_f:
for line in lines:
new_f.write(line)
here's some other method to remove a/some line(s) from a file:
src_file = zzzz.txt
f = open(src_file, "r")
contents = f.readlines()
f.close()
contents.pop(idx) # remove the line item from list, by line number, starts from 0
f = open(src_file, "w")
contents = "".join(contents)
f.write(contents)
f.close()
You can use the re library
Assuming that you are able to load your full txt-file. You then define a list of unwanted nicknames and then substitute them with an empty string "".
# Delete unwanted characters
import re
# Read, then decode for py2 compat.
path_to_file = 'data/nicknames.txt'
text = open(path_to_file, 'rb').read().decode(encoding='utf-8')
# Define unwanted nicknames and substitute them
unwanted_nickname_list = ['SourDough']
text = re.sub("|".join(unwanted_nickname_list), "", text)
Do you want to remove a specific line from file so use this snippet short and simple code you can easily remove any line with sentence or prefix(Symbol).
with open("file_name.txt", "r") as f:
lines = f.readlines()
with open("new_file.txt", "w") as new_f:
for line in lines:
if not line.startswith("write any sentence or symbol to remove line"):
new_f.write(line)
To delete a specific line of a file by its line number:
Replace variables filename and line_to_delete with the name of your file and the line number you want to delete.
filename = 'foo.txt'
line_to_delete = 3
initial_line = 1
file_lines = {}
with open(filename) as f:
content = f.readlines()
for line in content:
file_lines[initial_line] = line.strip()
initial_line += 1
f = open(filename, "w")
for line_number, line_content in file_lines.items():
if line_number != line_to_delete:
f.write('{}\n'.format(line_content))
f.close()
print('Deleted line: {}'.format(line_to_delete))
Example output:
Deleted line: 3
Take the contents of the file, split it by newline into a tuple. Then, access your tuple's line number, join your result tuple, and overwrite to the file.
In Python, calling e.g. temp = open(filename,'r').readlines() results in a list in which each element is a line from the file. However, these strings have a newline character at the end, which I don't want.
How can I get the data without the newlines?
You can read the whole file and split lines using str.splitlines:
temp = file.read().splitlines()
Or you can strip the newline by hand:
temp = [line[:-1] for line in file]
Note: this last solution only works if the file ends with a newline, otherwise the last line will lose a character.
This assumption is true in most cases (especially for files created by text editors, which often do add an ending newline anyway).
If you want to avoid this you can add a newline at the end of file:
with open(the_file, 'r+') as f:
f.seek(-1, 2) # go at the end of the file
if f.read(1) != '\n':
# add missing newline if not already present
f.write('\n')
f.flush()
f.seek(0)
lines = [line[:-1] for line in f]
Or a simpler alternative is to strip the newline instead:
[line.rstrip('\n') for line in file]
Or even, although pretty unreadable:
[line[:-(line[-1] == '\n') or len(line)+1] for line in file]
Which exploits the fact that the return value of or isn't a boolean, but the object that was evaluated true or false.
The readlines method is actually equivalent to:
def readlines(self):
lines = []
for line in iter(self.readline, ''):
lines.append(line)
return lines
# or equivalently
def readlines(self):
lines = []
while True:
line = self.readline()
if not line:
break
lines.append(line)
return lines
Since readline() keeps the newline also readlines() keeps it.
Note: for symmetry to readlines() the writelines() method does not add ending newlines, so f2.writelines(f.readlines()) produces an exact copy of f in f2.
temp = open(filename,'r').read().split('\n')
Reading file one row at the time. Removing unwanted chars from end of the string with str.rstrip(chars).
with open(filename, 'r') as fileobj:
for row in fileobj:
print(row.rstrip('\n'))
See also str.strip([chars]) and str.lstrip([chars]).
I think this is the best option.
temp = [line.strip() for line in file.readlines()]
temp = open(filename,'r').read().splitlines()
My preferred one-liner -- if you don't count from pathlib import Path :)
lines = Path(filename).read_text().splitlines()
This it auto-closes the file, no need for with open()...
Added in Python 3.5.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#pathlib.Path.read_text
Try this:
u=open("url.txt","r")
url=u.read().replace('\n','')
print(url)
To get rid of trailing end-of-line (/n) characters and of empty list values (''), try:
f = open(path_sample, "r")
lines = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in f.readlines() if line.strip() != '']
You can read the file as a list easily using a list comprehension
with open("foo.txt", 'r') as f:
lst = [row.rstrip('\n') for row in f]
my_file = open("first_file.txt", "r")
for line in my_file.readlines():
if line[-1:] == "\n":
print(line[:-1])
else:
print(line)
my_file.close()
This script here will take lines from file and save every line without newline with ,0 at the end in file2.
file = open("temp.txt", "+r")
file2 = open("res.txt", "+w")
for line in file:
file2.writelines(f"{line.splitlines()[0]},0\n")
file2.close()
if you looked at line, this value is data\n, so we put splitlines()
to make it as an array and [0] to choose the only word data
import csv
with open(filename) as f:
csvreader = csv.reader(f)
for line in csvreader:
print(line[0])
I am reading a file and getting the first element from each start of the line, and comparing it to my list, if found, then I append it to the new output file that is supposed to be exactly like the input file in terms of the structure.
my_id_list = [
4985439
5605471
6144703
]
input file:
4985439 16:0.0719814
5303698 6:0.09407 19:0.132581
5605471 5:0.0486076
5808678 8:0.130536
6144703 5:0.193785 19:0.0492507
6368619 3:0.242678 6:0.041733
my attempt:
output_file = []
input_file = open('input_file', 'r')
for line in input_file:
my_line = np.array(line.split())
id = str(my_line[0])
if id in my_id_list:
output_file.append(line)
np.savetxt("output_file", output_file, fmt='%s')
Question is:
It is currently adding an extra empty line after each line written to the output file. How can I fix it? or is there any other way to do it more efficiently?
update:
output file should be for this example:
4985439 16:0.0719814
5605471 5:0.0486076
6144703 5:0.193785 19:0.0492507
try something like this
# read lines and strip trailing newline characters
with open('input_file','r') as f:
input_lines = [line.strip() for line in f.readlines()]
# collect all the lines that match your id list
output_file = [line for line in input_lines if line.split()[0] in my_id_list]
# write to output file
with open('output_file','w') as f:
f.write('\n'.join(output_file))
I don't know what numpy does to the text when reading it, but this is how you could do it without numpy:
my_id_list = {4985439, 5605471, 6144703} # a set is faster for membership testing
with open('input_file') as input_file:
# Your problem is most likely related to line-endings, so here
# we read the inputfile into an list of lines with intact line endings.
# To preserve the input, exactly, you would need to open the files
# in binary mode ('rb' for the input file, and 'wb' for the output
# file below).
lines = input_file.read().splitlines(keepends=True)
with open('output_file', 'w') as output_file:
for line in lines:
first_word = line.split()[0]
if first_word in my_id_list:
output_file.write(line)
getting the first word of each line is wasteful, since this:
first_word = line.split()[0]
creates a list of all "words" in the line when we just need the first one.
If you know that the columns are separated by spaces you can make it more efficient by only splitting on the first space:
first_word = line.split(' ', 1)[0]