I'm working in Qgis with python cnsole. I have a file**.asc** whose structure is:

Ncols 49

Nrows 52

Xllcorner 2611187.75

Yllcorner 4336914.199

Cellsize 1000

NODATA_value -9999

0.5081 0.679 0.7024 0.6603 0.5643 0.4668 0.4865 0.4715 0.3534 0.4496 0.4205 0.442 0.4031 0.4352 0.3941 0.3504 0.2506 0.2586 0.3519 0.2247 0.2494 0.3148 0.3963 0.4558 0.4613 0.4471 0.4366 0.4119 0.4474 0.3852 0.4362 0.3907 0.4118 0.5387 0.4045 0.4721 0.5246 0.6007 0.5516 0.5795 0.6485 0.6084 0.6288 0.4513 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999
0.5434 0.5707 0.5578 0.5205 0.5995 0.5414 0.5542 0.4757 0.4744 0.4276 0.3882 0.4132 0.4445 0.5414 0.3823 0.2908 0.2554 0.2356 0.2631 0.3037 0.3778 0.4221 0.4259 0.5337 0.4998 0.4603 0.3888 0.4412 0.4615 0.453 0.4019 0.4295 0.4321 0.4383 0.4226 0.4113 0.3462 0.5567 0.3907 0.3432 0.6684 0.7217 0.7315 0.6078 0.6322 0.529 -9999 -9999 -9999 ...

I have to find the maximum value in the file and I tried:

GridFile = open('filepath \ file.asc', 'r')
MaxValue = max (GridFile)

But the procedure returns the following error

ValueError: max () is an empty sequence.

What I understand is that I have to skip the first 6 lines and find the maximum of successive values, but I do not know how to do it.

Can anyone help me solve this problem?

Thanks