how to handle files In Python using the “with open” statement
Open, read and write to a file in python using the “with open” statement.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to open, read and write to a file in python using the “with open” statement.
Write to a file.
Let's assume we want to write some data to a file called output.txt. We can use the “with open” statement to open the file, write our data to it, and automatically close it when we are done with it.
In the code snippet above, we have used the “with open” statement to open the file output.txt in write mode ('w'). “w” means write mode. Then, we assign the resulting file object to the variable file.
To write some text to the file, we used the write () method to write the string “Welcome to Jacob Tech Institute” to the file.
Since we used the “with open” statement, it automatically closes the file for us. This is important because it ensures that the file is properly closed even if an exception occurs while reading from it.
Read a file.
To read a file in Python, it is possible to use the “with open” statement to open the file in the read mode ('r') and then read its content. Here's an example:
In the code snippet above, We have equally used the “with open” statement to open the file input.txt in the read mode ('r'). Then, we also assign the resulting file object to the variable file.
In the next step, we used the read () method to read the contents of the file into the variable data and then print the content of the data using the print () function.
Since we used the “with open” statement to open the file, it automatically closes the file. This is significant because it ensures that the file is closed properly even if an exception occurs while we are reading from it.
Important points
It should be noted that the read () method reads the entire contents of the file into memory at once, so it may not be appropriate for very large files. In those cases, you should read the file one line at a time with the readline () or readlines () methods.
Congratulations: That's all! You now understand how to use the “with open” statement in Python to read a file.