Reading a tab delimited text file.

[Tim Chase]

>>    time_vec, ch1_vec, and_so_on = zip(*(
>>      map(float, line.split())
>>      for line in file('in.txt')))
>>
>> If this isn't homework, there are some less terse versions which
>> are a bit easier on the eyes and less like some love-child
>> between Perl and Python.
> 
> haha, no this isn't homework. I'm a mechanical engineering student
> working on a research project and this program is for my personal use
> to analyze the data.

The "zip-star map-float" variant is a pretty unreadable way to go.

The more readable versions look something like

   data = [map(float, line.split()) for line in file('in.txt')]
   time_vec = [bit[0] for bit in data]
   ch1_vec = [bit[1] for bit in data]
   and_so_on = [bit[2] for bit in data]

or even

   time_vec = []
   ch1_vec = []
   and_so_on = []
   for line in file('in.txt'):
     a,b,c = map(float, line.split())
     time_vec.append(a)
     ch1_vec.append(b)
     and_so_on.append(c)

which could also be written as

   for line in file('in.txt'):
     line = line.split()
     time_vec.append(float(line[0]))
     ch1_vec.append(float(line[1]))
     and_so_on.append(float(line[2]))

-tkc