title: How to read a dataset from a txt file in Python?
body: <p>I have a dataset in this format:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/dTBds.png" alt="example data"></p>
  
  <p>I need to import the data and work with it. </p>
  
  <p>The main problem is that the first and the fourth columns are strings while the second and third columns are floats and ints, respectively.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like to put the data in a matrix or at least obtain a list of each column's data.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to read the whole dataset as a string but it's a mess:</p>
  
  <pre><code>f = open ( 'input.txt' , 'r')
  l = [ map(str,line.split('\t')) for line in f ]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What could be a good solution?</p>