Python: How to read a txt file next line by splitting its column number

Question

I have some data and I am trying to read a txt file and read it line by line in excel by implementing a specific column number. For example:

0.12345 0.14251 0.12155...... 0.25541

And say after filling up 1000th column I want to put the next data into the next line:

0.12345 0.14251 0.12155...... 0.25541
0.15845 0.17151 0.19255...... 0.23572

I understand that if I have some kind of string (eg.~) after that number I want to split, this could be done using data.split like so:

data = testingdata.readline()   #reading a line from the .txt file 
data = data.split("~") #filter the ~ and put that into the next row

But in this case, I only know the column number I want to split rather than a known string. How could I possibly implement the same method here?

Thank you so much in advance for help!

What do you mean by "put data into the next row"? Are you writing back to the excel? Do you want a new string to use it elsewhere? — RichieV, Aug 13 '20 at 05:05

DV82XL · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-13T12:31:50.983

Here is a solution that allows you to split a string by specific number of columns. Hopefully you can adapt this code to your needs. I got the idea from here: Is there a way to split a string by every nth separator in Python?.

s = '1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10'
delimiter = ' '
n = 3

numbers = s.split(delimiter)
group_indices = range(0, len(numbers), n)
rows = [delimiter.join(numbers[i:i+n]) for i in group_indices]
print(rows)

Output:

['1 2 3', '4 5 6', '7 8 9', '10']

Once you have a list of rows, you can do whatever you want with them. For example:

text_block = '\n'.join(rows)
print(text_block)

Output:

Python: How to read a txt file next line by splitting its column number

1 Answers1