How to read the contents of a file with their specific data types and not as string in python?

Question

I have a file with “mark,19,2050.50,Chris,20,2010.40” as its content. If I read the file using open(), the contents are assigned into the file as textIOwrapper. If I split and store it in a list using the delimiter(‘,’ in this case) the list contains the values as strings.

For eg : [‘mark’,’19’,’2050.50’, ‘Chris’,’20’,’2010.40’]

I need the output to be

[‘mark’, 19, 2050.50, ‘Chris’,20,2010.40]

Any idea how to do this? Thanks

Should be able to use this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20929983/3715522 — MCBama, May 06 '19 at 14:30

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 06 '19 at 14:31

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You can't read the specific data types, because you don't know the data types. Everything in a file is assumed to be a string.

You could try to check for some specific cases, but you are better off using a library that already does that for you. Use panda's function pandas.read_csv.

answered May 06 '19 at 14:31

blue_note

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What if I have the datatypes of the values in the files – Rahul May 06 '19 at 14:54

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 06 '19 at 15:13

Here is a SO solution for an autocast. He uses it as a decorator, but basically the function alone would also accomplish what you need. It just tries to cast it as either int, float or if both fail, as a string. Nevertheless, if you parse big files that might slow it down. If you have more than the base types it probably won't be as easy.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 07 '19 at 11:20

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eval() seems to do the trick for basic data types

Thanks for the suggestions

answered May 07 '19 at 11:20

Rahul

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How to read the contents of a file with their specific data types and not as string in python?

3 Answers3