title: How to assign columns of data to variables
body: <p>I'm writing a general program to read and plot large amounts of data from .txt files. Each file has a different number of columns. I do know that each file has 8 columns that I'm not interested in, so I can figure out the number of relevant columns that way. How can I read the data and sort each relevant column's data into a separate variable?</p>
  
  <p>This is what I have so far:</p>
  
  <pre><code>datafile = 'plotspecies.txt'
  with open(datafile) as file:
      reader = csv.reader(file, delimiter=' ', skipinitialspace=True)
      first_row = next(reader)
      num_cols = len(first_row)
      rows = csv.reader(file, delimiter = ' ', quotechar = '"')
      data = [data for data in rows]
  
  num_species = num_cols - 8
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've seen people say that pandas is good for this sort of thing, but I can't seem to import it. I'd prefer a solution without it. </p>