Reading a specific line in a text file

[astroumut]

Hi,

I need a help regarding reading a line in a text file. I have some files with columns but some header information at the top. Some of these header lines begin with a *, and some of them with nothing. I have to read the 9th line and 5th column, then extract the number from here and save it to another text file.

I was thinking of some solutions.
1) I can delete the first 8 lines and read the columns straightforward .
2) I first read the 9th line and then the 5th column, by using f.readline() or etc. However, readline only reads the first line and I could not tell to read the 9th line.

I could not made neither of those solutions. The second would be much better because at the end I do not lose the header info. I have hundreds of these files, any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[micmast]

you could read the entire file in an array and use that array like this
array[8]
and continue from there on out

[bvdet]

micmast's suggestion should work by using file method f.readlines(). List index 0 is your header and index 8 is your line of data. Assuming the separator is a comma:

f = open(file_name)
fileList = f.readlines()
f.close()
fifth_column = fileList[8].split(',')[4]

[astroumut]

Great, it is working perfectly.

Thanks a lot...