Reading files line by line in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reading files line by line

📖 Scenario: You have a text file named fruits.txt that contains a list of fruit names, one on each line. You want to read this file line by line to process the fruit names.

🎯 Goal: Build a Python program that reads the fruits.txt file line by line and stores each fruit name in a list called fruit_list. Then print the list.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable called filename with the value 'fruits.txt'.

Create an empty list called fruit_list to store fruit names.

Use a with open(filename, 'r') block to open the file for reading.

Use a for loop with the variable line to read the file line by line.

Inside the loop, use line.strip() to remove extra spaces and newlines.

Append each stripped line to fruit_list.

Print the fruit_list after reading all lines.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading files line by line is useful when you want to process large text files without loading everything into memory at once, like reading logs or data files.

💼 Career

Many programming jobs require reading and processing files efficiently, especially in data analysis, web development, and automation tasks.

1

Set the filename and create an empty list

Create a variable called filename and set it to 'fruits.txt'. Then create an empty list called fruit_list.

Python

filename = 'fruits.txt'
fruit_list = []
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use filename = 'fruits.txt' to store the file name and fruit_list = [] to create an empty list.

2

Open the file for reading

Add a with open(filename, 'r') block to open the file for reading.

Python

filename = 'fruits.txt'
fruit_list = []

with open(filename, 'r') as file:
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use with open(filename, 'r') as file: to open the file safely for reading.

3

Read the file line by line and add to list

Inside the with block, use a for loop with the variable line to read the file line by line. Inside the loop, use line.strip() to remove spaces and newlines, then append the result to fruit_list.

Python

filename = 'fruits.txt'
fruit_list = []

with open(filename, 'r') as file:
    for line in file:
        # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use for line in file: to read each line, then fruit_list.append(line.strip()) to add the cleaned line to the list.

4

Print the list of fruits

After the with block, write a print(fruit_list) statement to display the list of fruits.

Python

filename = 'fruits.txt'
fruit_list = []

with open(filename, 'r') as file:
    for line in file:
        fruit_list.append(line.strip())

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(fruit_list) to show the list after reading the file.