Learn Python 2: Course OverviewCourse Overview

File Input and Output

Apply what you've learned about Python to a real-world application.

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File Input/Output

Lesson 1 of 1

1
See It to Believe It
Until now, the Python code you’ve been writing comes from one source and only goes to one place: you type it in at the keyboard and its results are displayed in the console. But what if you want to…
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2
The open() Function
Let’s walk through the process of writing to a file one step at a time. The first code that you saw executed in the previous exercise was this: f = open(“output.txt”, “w”) This told Python to o…
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3
Writing
Good work! Now it’s time to write some data to a new .txt file. We added the list comprehension from the first exercise to the code in the editor. Our goal in this exercise will be to write each e…
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4
Reading
Excellent! You’re a pro. Finally, we want to know how to read from our output.txt file. As you might expect, we do this with the read() function, like so: print my_file.read()
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5
Reading Between the Lines
What if we want to read from a file line by line, rather than pulling the entire file in at once. Thankfully, Python includes a .readline() method that does exactly that. If you open a file and ca…
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6
PSA: Buffering Data
We keep telling you that you always need to close your files after you’re done writing to them. Here’s why! During the I/O process, data is buffered: this means that it is held in a temporary lo…
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7
The 'with' and 'as' Keywords
Programming is all about getting the computer to do the work. Is there a way to get Python to automatically close our files for us? Of course there is. This is Python. You may not know this, but …
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8
Try It Yourself
It worked! Our Python program successfully wrote to text.txt.
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9
Case Closed?
Finally, we’ll want a way to test whether a file we’ve opened is closed. Sometimes we’ll have a lot of file objects open, and if we’re not careful, they won’t all be closed. How can we test this? …
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