#!/usr/bin/python
#
# This program expects the
# file List.txt to exist
#
file = open('List.txt', 'r')
shoppingList = file.readlines()
print shoppingList[0]
print shoppingList[2]
print """Note
 each item in the list produced
 by readlines() contains a newline character
"""

Credit = """ By David MacKay.
Adapted from
http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/pyBiblio/
"""