Get the first n characters of a line from a text file?

Question

I am trying to get the first 33 characters of a line from a text file. As an example, I have the following model:

The text file looks like this:

['1996/01/11', '00:14:36', '267', '18', '499', '571', '426', '0', '-64.3*', '-------', '-------', '272', 'Only', 'C3']
['1996/01/13', '22:08:30', '2020', '16', '290', '278', '303', '372', '2.8*', '-------', '-------', '266', 'Only', 'C3']

And I want to take only the first 33 characters of it.

I tried doing this:

with open(filename, 'r') as filehandle:
    current_line = 1
    for line in filehandle:
        if current_line > 4:
            words = line.split()
            print(str(words[0:33]) + "\n")
        current_line += 1

However, I did not succeed. Can you help me please?

I want to do this because I need the date, the time and also the first values in order to concatenate the date and the time into datetime and have the value separately.

Answer 1

You can simply slice the array like that:

line[0:33]