importing external ".txt" file in python

Question

I am trying to import a text with a list about 10 words.

import words.txt

That doesn't work... Anyway, Can I import the file without this showing up?

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "D:/python/p1.py", line 9, in <module>
import words.txt
ImportError: No module named 'words'

Any sort of help is appreciated.

Answer 1

As you can't import a .txt file, I would suggest to read words this way.

list_ = open("world.txt").read().split()

Answer 2

Import gives you access to other modules in your program. You can't decide to import a text file. If you want to read from a file that's in the same directory, you can look at this. Here's another StackOverflow post about it.

Answer 3

The "import" keyword is for attaching python definitions that are created external to the current python program. So in your case, where you just want to read a file with some text in it, use:

text = open("words.txt", "rb").read()

Answer 4

This answer is modified from infrared's answer at Splitting large text file by a delimiter in Python

with open('words.txt') as fp:
    contents = fp.read()
    for entry in contents:
        # do something with entry  

Answer 5

numpy's genfromtxt or loadtxt is what I use:

import numpy as np
...
wordset = np.genfromtxt(fname='words.txt')

This got me headed in the right direction and solved my problem.

Answer 6

You can import modules but not text files. If you want to print the content do the following:

Open a text file for reading:

f = open('words.txt', 'r')

Store content in a variable:

content = f.read()

Print content of this file:

print(content)

After you're done close a file:

f.close()