importing external ".txt" file in python

You can import modules but not text files. If you want to print the content do the following:

Open a text file for reading:

f = open('words.txt', 'r') 

Store content in a variable:

content = f.read() 

Print content of this file:

print(content) 

After you're done close a file:

f.close() 

As you can't import a .txt file, I would suggest to read words this way.

list_ = open("world.txt").read().split() 

This answer is modified from infrared's answer at Splitting large text file by a delimiter in Python

with open('words.txt') as fp: contents = fp.read() for entry in contents: # do something with entry 

The "import" keyword is for attaching python definitions that are created external to the current python program. So in your case, where you just want to read a file with some text in it, use:

text = open("words.txt", "rb").read()

numpy's genfromtxt or loadtxt is what I use:

import numpy as np ... wordset = np.genfromtxt(fname='words.txt') 

This got me headed in the right direction and solved my problem.

Import gives you access to other modules in your program. You can't decide to import a text file. If you want to read from a file that's in the same directory, you can look at this. Here's another StackOverflow post about it.