How to Efficiently Read a File Line by Line into a List in Python?

How to Read a File Line-by-Line into a List in Python

When working with textual data, it's often necessary to read and process files line by line. Python provides several methods to accomplish this task. One convenient approach is to store the lines in a list for easy manipulation.

To achieve this, simply follow these steps:

1. Open the file using the with open() statement, remembering to specify the file mode as 'r'.
2. Iterate over the file using a for loop, where each iteration reads a single line.
3. Use the rstrip() method to remove any trailing whitespace characters from each line.
4. Append the trimmed line to a list.

Here's an example:

with open('my_file.txt', 'r') as file:
    lines = []
    for line in file:
        lines.append(line.rstrip())

# Process the list of lines further if needed

For larger files, it's recommended to process each line individually using a while loop to avoid loading the entire file into memory. Additionally, you can specify the encoding used when reading the file to ensure proper handling of character sets.

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