Reading lines of text

When working with text files, the easiest way to process them is usually by line; each line of text is a separate entity and we can build them back by joining all lines by '\n' or '\r\n' depending on the system, thus it would be very convenient to have all the lines of a text file available in a list.

There is a very convenient way to grab lines out of a text file that Python makes instantly available.

How to do it...

As the file object itself is an iterable, we can directly build a list out of it:

with open('/var/log/install.log') as f:
    lines = list(f)

How it works...

open acts as a context manager, returning the resulting object file. It's very convenient to rely on the context manager as, when we are done with our file, we need to close it and using open as a context manager will actually do that for us as soon as we quit the body of with.

The interesting part is that file is actually an iterable. When you iterate over a file, you get back the lines that are contained...