Reading a tab delimited text file.

[Stephen]

On Feb 23, 4:06 pm, Tim Chase <python.l... at tim.thechases.com> wrote:
> > I would like to read a text file of numbers produced by a data
> > acquisition system into three vectors of doubles. The contents of the
> > file are:
>
> > +0.0000000e+0      +2.7645134e+1   +2.7745625e+1
> > +0.4100041e-1      +2.7637787e+1   +2.7731047e+1
> > +0.0820008e+0      +2.7645134e+1   +2.7750483e+1
> > ...
>
> > or
>
> > +0.0000000e+0\t+2.7645134e+1\t+2.7745625e+1\r\n
> > ...
>
> > I would like to read the first column into time_vec, second into
> > ch1_vec and so on.
>
> > (I have never programmed in python and am having trouble finding a way
> > to do this).
>
> Well, a very terse way of doing it would be something like:
>
>    time_vec, ch1_vec, and_so_on = zip(*(
>      map(float, line.split())
>      for line in file('in.txt')))
>
> If my junior developer authored that, I'm not sure whether I'd
> laud her or fire her. :)
>
> If this isn't homework, there are some less terse versions which
> are a bit easier on the eyes and less like some love-child
> between Perl and Python.
>
> -tkc

haha, no this isn't homework. I'm a mechanical engineering student
working on a research project and this program is for my personal use
to analyze the data.