parsing a tab-separated file in Python

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You can use the csv module to parse tab seperated value files easily.

import csv

with open("tab-separated-values") as tsv:
    for line in csv.reader(tsv, dialect="excel-tab"): #You can also use delimiter="\t" rather than giving a dialect.
        ...

Where line is a list of the values on the current row for each iteration.

Edit: As suggested below, if you want to read by column, and not by row, then the best thing to do is use the zip() builtin:

with open("tab-separated-values") as tsv:
    for column in zip(*[line for line in csv.reader(tsv, dialect="excel-tab")]):
        ...

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