So like the title says im starting to learn some python and im having trouble picking up on this technique. What I need to accomplish is to read in some numbers and store them in a list. The text file looks like the following: 0 0 3 50 50 100 4 20 Basically these are coordinates and directions to be used for python's turtle to make shapes. I got that part down the only problem is getting them in a correct format. So what I can not figure out is how to get those numbers from the file into [ [0, 0, 3, 50], [50, 100, 4, 20] ] A list, with each four coordinates being a list in that one big list. Heres my attempt but it as I said I need some help - thank you. polyShape=[] infile = open(name,"r") num = int(infile.readline(2)) while num != "": polyShape.append(num) num = int(infile.readline(2)) infile.close()