[python] Reading specific columns from a text file in python

I have a text file which contains a table comprised of numbers e.g:

5 10 6

6 20 1

7 30 4

8 40 3

9 23 1

4 13 6

if for example I want the numbers contained only in the second column, how do i extract that column into a list?

You can use a zip function with a list comprehension :

with open('ex.txt') as f:
    print zip(*[line.split() for line in f])[1]

result :

('10', '20', '30', '40', '23', '13')

It may help:

import csv
with open('csv_file','r') as f:
    # Printing Specific Part of CSV_file
    # Printing last line of second column
    lines = list(csv.reader(f, delimiter = ' ', skipinitialspace = True))
    print(lines[-1][1])
    # For printing a range of rows except 10 last rows of second column
    for i in range(len(lines)-10):
        print(lines[i][1])

I know this is an old question, but nobody mentioned that when your data looks like an array, numpy's loadtxt comes in handy:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.loadtxt("myfile.txt")[:, 1]
array([10., 20., 30., 40., 23., 13.])

You have a space delimited file, so use the module designed for reading delimited values files, csv.

import csv

with open('path/to/file.txt') as inf:
    reader = csv.reader(inf, delimiter=" ")
    second_col = list(zip(*reader))[1]
    # In Python2, you can omit the `list(...)` cast

The zip(*iterable) pattern is useful for converting rows to columns or vice versa. If you're reading a file row-wise...

>>> testdata = [[1, 2, 3],
                [4, 5, 6],
                [7, 8, 9]]

>>> for line in testdata:
...     print(line)

[1, 2, 3]
[4, 5, 6]
[7, 8, 9]

...but need columns, you can pass each row to the zip function

>>> testdata_columns = zip(*testdata)
# this is equivalent to zip([1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9])

>>> for line in testdata_columns:
...     print(line)

[1, 4, 7]
[2, 5, 8]
[3, 6, 9]

First of all we open the file and as datafile then we apply .read() method reads the file contents and then we split the data which returns something like: ['5', '10', '6', '6', '20', '1', '7', '30', '4', '8', '40', '3', '9', '23', '1', '4', '13', '6'] and the we applied list slicing on this list to start from the element at index position 1 and skip next 3 elements untill it hits the end of the loop.

with open("sample.txt", "r") as datafile:
    print datafile.read().split()[1::3]

Output:

['10', '20', '30', '40', '23', '13']