Read from a file

[github-learning-lab]

Now we're ready to really build our quote bot. To test things out, we'll read all the quotes from a file and print the first one.

First, you can remove our test quote, the print statement on line 2. You can either comment it out by adding a # at the start of the line, or remove it completely.

Next, remove the other comments by deleting # from the start of the other four lines to get Python code like this:

  f = open("quotes.txt")
  quotes = f.readlines()
  f.close()

  print(quotes)

Here we are opening the quotes.txt file, reading all the lines into a new variable called quotes, then closing the file (defined by the variable f). Finally, we print out the quotes.

You can run this code and we'll get a dump of all the quotes in the quotes file. That's because Python stored them all in an array, which is a single variable that holds a list of values.

Print the first element of an array

Since we only want one quote, we need to edit our code to print only the first value in the quotes array.

In your code, find the print line and add this special modifier [0] so that the line now reads:
print(quotes[0])

The square brackets tell Python that we want a specific item in the array. Since it starts counting at zero, we've grabbed the first item.

Comment with the first quote

Run your code and copy the value to your clipboard.

Paste the quote as a comment here and I'll follow up with next steps!