PYTHON FILE HANDLING
Open a file on the server
To open the file, use the built-in open() function.
The open() function returns a file object, which has a read() method for reading the
content of the file:
#’r’ here specifies the reading mode of the file.
f = open("demofile.txt", "r")
print(f.read())
If the file is located in a different location, you will have to
specify the file path, like this:
f = open("D:\\myfiles\welcome.txt", "r")
print(f.read())
To read only parts of the file-
By default the read() method returns the whole text, but you can also
specify how many characters you want to return:
f = open("demofile.txt", "r")
print(f.read(5))
-It will return 5 first characters of the file.
To read lines-
You can return one line by using the readline() method:
f = open("demofile.txt", "r")
print(f.readline())
To read n lines from the file, use readline(), n times:
Example- To read two lines of the file:
f = open("demofile.txt", "r")
print(f.readline())
print(f.readline())
Read complete file-
You can read the complete file by looping through the lines of the
file.
f = open("demofile.txt", "r")
for x in f:
print(x)
Close Files-
You can close the files using close() method.
f = open("demofile.txt", "r")
print(f.readline())
f.close()
PYTHON FILE WRITE
To write to an existing file, you must add a parameter to the open() function:
"a" - Append - will append to the end of the file
"w" - Write - will overwrite any existing content
f = open("demofile2.txt", "a")
f.write("Now the file has more content!")
f.close()
#’w’ will overwrite the existing content.
f = open("demofile3.txt", "w")
f.write("Woops! I have deleted the content!")
f.close()
Create a New File-
"x" - Create - will create a file, returns an error if the file exist
"a" - Append - will create a file if the specified file does not exist
"w" - Write - will create a file if the specified file does not exist
Writing into a .csv file
Using csv.Writer class
import csv
# field names
fields = ['Name', 'Branch', 'Year', 'CGPA']
# data rows of csv file
rows = [ ['Nikhil', 'COE', '2', '9.0'],
['Sanchit', 'COE', '2', '9.1'],
['Aditya', 'IT', '2', '9.3'],
['Sagar', 'SE', '1', '9.5'],
['Prateek', 'MCE', '3', '7.8'],
['Sahil', 'EP', '2', '9.1']]
# name of csv file
filename = "university_records.csv"
# writing to csv file
with open(filename, 'w') as csvfile:
# creating a csv writer object
csvwriter = csv.writer(csvfile)
# writing the fields
csvwriter.writerow(fields)
# writing the data rows
csvwriter.writerows(rows)
Using csv.Dictwriter class
# importing the csv module
import csv
# my data rows as dictionary objects
mydict =[{'branch': 'COE', 'cgpa': '9.0', 'name': 'Nikhil', 'year':
'2'},
{'branch': 'COE', 'cgpa': '9.1', 'name': 'Sanchit',
'year': '2'},
{'branch': 'IT', 'cgpa': '9.3', 'name': 'Aditya',
'year': '2'},
{'branch': 'SE', 'cgpa': '9.5', 'name': 'Sagar',
'year': '1'},
{'branch': 'MCE', 'cgpa': '7.8', 'name': 'Prateek',
'year': '3'},
{'branch': 'EP', 'cgpa': '9.1', 'name': 'Sahil',
'year': '2'}]
# field names
fields = ['name', 'branch', 'year', 'cgpa']
# name of csv file
filename = "university_records.csv"
# writing to csv file
with open(filename, 'w') as csvfile:
# creating a csv dict writer object
writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames = fields)
# writing headers (field names)
writer.writeheader()
# writing data rows
writer.writerows(mydict)
