How can I import data from this .dat file

Question

I have data in a file that looks like this:

As you can see the data is very neat, but it is not separated in a concise fashion, but rather a variable number of spaces between columns and some columns left blank. This makes it import incorrectly into, for example, Excel. I have tried import functions in spyder and sage. I did not create the file.

Answer 1

try import it and see what you get.

media = []
with open("filename.dat", "r") as f:
    media.append(f.readlines())
for row in media:
    do something with row

on 2nd thought it looks like it may be tab-delimited:

import csv
with open("filename.dat", "rB") as f:
    csv_file = csv.reader(f, deilmiter='\t')
for row in csv_file:
    do something with row

Answer 2

This is a fixed width file, so using pandas with python is the way to go:

http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_fwf.html