"The above text file used has 3 lines of 4 elements separated by commas. The variable numLines prints out as '4' not '3'. So, len(myLines) is returning the number of elements in each list not the length of the list of lists."
It sounds like you're reading in a .csv with 3 rows and 4 columns. If this is the case, you can find the number of rows and lines by using the .split() method:
text = open("filetest.txt", "r").read()
myRows = text.split("\n") #this method tells Python to split your filetest object each time it encounters a line break
print len(myRows) #will tell you how many rows you have
for row in myRows:
myColumns = row.split(",") #this method will consider each of your rows one at a time. For each of those rows, it will split that row each time it encounters a comma.
print len(myColumns) #will tell you, for each of your rows, how many columns that row contains