Considering migrating to Python from Visual Basic 6 for engineering applications

[wrong.address.1 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, 18 February 2016 21:31:20 UTC+2, Tim Chase  wrote:
> On 2016-02-18 07:33, wrong.address.1 at gmail.com wrote:
> > Another question I have is regarding reading numerical data from
> > text files. Is it necessary to read one character at a time, or can
> > one read like in Fortran and Basic (something like Input #5, X1,
> > X2, X3)?
> 
> A lot of my work is extracting data from text files.  If it's
> CSV-format data, Python's "csv" module in the standard library offers
> some nice tools for doing this.
> 
> If the numbers are in plain-text, but at fixed column-offsets, I
> usually create a mapping of slices to make it easier to work with.
> If this is the case and you want some example code, I can dig some up.
> 
> Finally, if the data is actually binary, Python's "struct" module
> (also in the standard library) makes it a lot easier to work with such
> data.
> 
> -tkc

Thanks. The data I will often have to read from text files could read like

2 12.657823 0.1823467E-04 114 0
3 4 5 9 11
"Lower"
278.15

Is it straightforward to read this, or does one have to read one character at a time and then figure out what the numbers are?