How do I read a text file as a list? code example

Example 1: python read text file into a list

text_file = open("filename.dat", "r")
lines = text_file.readlines()
print lines
print len(lines)
text_file.close()

Example 2: python read text file to list

with open(filename) as f:
    content = f.readlines()
# you may also want to remove whitespace characters like `\n` at the end of each line
content = [x.strip() for x in content]