difference between readlines() and split() [python]

python, readfile

Solution

`readlines` splits the entire file into lines and is nearly equivalent to `file.read().split('\n')`, except that the latter will remove new lines, whereas `readlines` by itself will retain new lines.

Your example,

for line in file:
    values = line.split()

splits each line by its spaces, building a list of words in the line. `value` is overwritten on each iteration so unless you save values somewhere, only parts of the file are in-memory at a single time.

Problem

imagine we have a `file = open("filetext.txt", 'r')` what is the difference between the split() method and the readlines() method It seems that both split each line and put it as a string in a list. so what makes them different ? ``` for line in file: values = line.split() #break each line into a list file.readlines() #return a list of strings each represent a single line in the file ```

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