Let’s first cover how to read a text file. Once you have a file open in Python, it’s time to do something to it. Once you have the file open, you can then read, write or modify it many different ways. The output will display the file stream with details such as type of file, access mode, and encoding. This mode is used to work with files other than text such as pdf, images, etc.

a – Opens the file for writing and appends the data at the end of file.

x – This option creates a new file if it no file exists but fails if already present.

There are various modes to open files in Python. When opening files, depending on what you intend to do with the file, you must define a specific mode as explained above in the inline comments.

Once you have a file object, that object contains methods and attributes to perform various operations. The open() method then returns a file stream which gets captured in the newfile variable. The above script contains the Python built-in method open() that opens the devops.txt file for reading without declaring an access mode.

# Declaring the Access mode 'read' exclusively # newfile is the file object, devops.txt is the file to be opened and default Access mode is read Now, create a file and copy the Python code shown below to it and then save it as a Python script called ata_python_read_file_demo.py in your home directory. Create a simple text file inside the home directory (~) and name it as devops.txt with the text *”*Hello, ATA friends.”ģ. Open your favorite code editor preferably one like VS Code.Ģ. Let’s get this tutorial started by first learning how to open a file for reading in Python.ġ. A code editor – This tutorial will use Visual Studio (VS) Code.Python v3.6 or later – This tutorial will be using Python v3.9.2 on a Windows 10 machine.If you’d like to follow along, ensure you have the following in place: This tutorial will be a step-by-step tutorial.

Can t open file for writing