Importing and exporting to a text file - Python

Question

I am trying to create a progam which diagnoses your computer by asking you questions. At the moment, the questions and answers are in lists in the program. How would I have all the questions and answers in a .txt file and import them in when the program runs. Also, how would I be able to export the users inputs to another .txt file. Thanks

Answer 1

If you format your text files as one question or answer per line, you can simple use the readlines method of file objects.

Let's say this is the file foo.txt:

This is the first line.
And here is the second.
Last is the third line.

To read this into a list:

In [2]: with open('foo.txt') as data:
   ...:     lines = data.readlines()
   ...:     

In [3]: lines
Out[3]: 
['This is the first line.\n',
 'And here is the second.\n',
 'Last is the third line.\n']

Note how these lines still contain the newline, which is probably not what you want. To change that we could do it like this:

In [5]: with open('foo.txt') as data:
    lines = data.read().splitlines()
   ...:

In [6]: lines
Out[6]: 
['This is the first line.',
 'And here is the second.',
 'Last is the third line.']