difference between readlines() and split() [python]

python readfile
Mozein picture Mozein · Feb 24, 2015 · Viewed 21.9k times · Source

imagine we have a file = open("filetext.txt", 'r')

what is the difference between the split() method and the readlines() method It seems that both split each line and put it as a string in a list. so what makes them different ?

for line in file:
    values = line.split()     #break each line into a list

file.readlines()  #return a list of strings each represent a single line in the file

Answer

tdelaney picture tdelaney · Feb 24, 2015

readlines splits the entire file into lines and is equivalent to file.read().split('\n'), but is a bit more efficient. Your example,

for line in file:
    values = line.split()

splits each line by its spaces, building a list of words in the line. value is overwritten on each iteration so unless you save values somewhere, only parts of the file are in-memory at a single time.

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