How To Write A List To A File In Python

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In this blog post, we will discuss how to write a list to a file in Python. This is a very useful skill to have when working with data, as it allows you to easily store and retrieve information in a structured format.

Let’s say we have the following list of strings:

my_list = ['apple', 'banana', 'cherry']

We want to write this list to a file called fruits.txt. Here’s how we can do it using the open function and a for loop:

with open('fruits.txt', 'w') as file:
    for item in my_list:
        file.write(item + 'n')

Let’s break down the code:

  1. We use the with statement to open the file in write mode ('w'). This also ensures that the file is properly closed after the code block is executed.
  2. We use a for loop to iterate through each item in the list.
  3. For each item, we use the write method to write the item to the file, followed by a newline character ('n') to separate each item on a new line.

Now, if we open the fruits.txt file, we’ll see the following content:

apple
banana
cherry

Writing a List of Numbers to a File

Let’s say we have a list of numbers, like this:

my_numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

In this case, we would need to modify our code slightly to convert each number to a string before writing it to the file. We can do this using the str() function:

with open('numbers.txt', 'w') as file:
    for number in my_numbers:
        file.write(str(number) + 'n')

Now, if we open the numbers.txt file, we’ll see the following content:

1
2
3
4
5

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have learned how to write a list to a file in Python using the open function and a for loop. We also discussed how to handle writing lists of strings and lists of numbers to a file.