File Handling
Dr. Arham Muslim
Innovative Technologies in Learning, SEECS, NUST
http://itl.seecs.nust.edu.pk/
Introduction
RAM
Hard Disk (SSD/HDD)
Var Var List
Program
Secondary Storage
Data only available until Data remain even after
program is running power is turned off!!
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File Handling
• File is a computer resource for recording data in a computer storage device
(e.g., hard disk)
• Any kind of information can be written to a file
• A file stored in a hard disk persist even after power is turned off
• Two broad types of files
• Text files contains data viewable in a text editor and understandable by humans
• Binary files contains a collection of binary information that is computer-readable
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File Handling Steps
• Handling file in Python consists of following three steps
Reading/Writing
Open a file Close the file
data from/to file
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Opening a File
• The key function for working with files in Python is the open() function
• General syntax
• File name is the name of the file or path to the file if it is not in the same directory
• Mode specifies the type operation you want to perform on the file
• A file can only be opened in a single mode at a time
• Modes of opening file
Mode Title Description
"r" Read Opens a file for reading, error if the file does not exist (Default value)
"a" Append Opens a file for appending, creates the file if it does not exist
"w" Write Opens a file for writing, creates the file if it does not exist
"x" Create Creates the specified file, returns an error if the file exists
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Opening a File – Example
• Opening file for reading from the same directory
• Opening file for reading from the user folder inside the data folder
• Opening file for writing from the same directory
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Closing a File
• After performing the required operations on the file, it should always be
closed using the close() method
• E.g.
• Closing a file releases valuable system resources
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Reading from a File
• To read from a file, it should be opened using the "r" mode
• The argument "r" can be omitted because it is the default value
• Make sure the file you want to read already exists otherwise a runtime error
will be thrown
• Python provides isfile() function from the os.path module to check if a file
exists or not
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Reading from a File – read()
• Reads the content of the file and return it as a string
• You can get a specific number of character by passing that number as an argument to the
read() function
• Data that has been read cannot be read again. You need to open the file again
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Reading from a File – readline()
• Reads a single line from a file and returns it as a string
• You can get a specific number of bytes (characters) of a line by passing that
number as an argument to the readline() function
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Reading from a File – readlines()
• Reads all the lines of a file and returns them as a list of strings
• A single argument is available to limit the number of lines to return
• If the total number of bytes (characters) returned exceeds the specified
number, no more lines are returned
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For Loop with File
• For loop can be used to iterate through the file data
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Writing to a File
• To write to a file, it should be opened using the "a", "w", or "x" mode
Mode Title Description
"a" Append • Opens a file for appending
• Creates the file if it does not exist
• New data is added at the end of old data
"w" Write • Opens a file for writing
• Creates the file if it does not exist
• Old data is deleted when new data is added
"x" Create • Creates the specified file
• Returns an error if the file exists
• Python provides two methods to write to a file
• write(string)
• writelines(lines)
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Write to a File – write()
• The write() method writes any string to an open file
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Write to a File – writelines()
• writelines() allow you to write multiple lines to a file
• It writes all the items of a list to the file
• Moving text to new line should be handled in the data. Python will not
automatically move each item to new line
• The list should only contain string items, any other type of item will throw
an error
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