Book Image

Learn Python in 7 Days

Book Image

Learn Python in 7 Days

Overview of this book

Python is a great language to get started in the world of programming and application development. This book will help you to take your skills to the next level having a good knowledge of the fundamentals of Python. We begin with the absolute foundation, covering the basic syntax, type variables and operators. We'll then move on to concepts like statements, arrays, operators, string processing and I/O handling. You’ll be able to learn how to operate tuples and understand the functions and methods of lists. We’ll help you develop a deep understanding of list and tuples and learn python dictionary. As you progress through the book, you’ll learn about function parameters and how to use control statements with the loop. You’ll further learn how to create modules and packages, storing of data as well as handling errors. We later dive into advanced level concepts such as Python collections and how to use class, methods, objects in python. By the end of this book, you will be able to take your skills to the next level having a good knowledge of the fundamentals of Python.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
2
Type Variables and Operators

Reading text from a file 


In order to read and write into a file, we will use the open() built-in function to open the file. The open() function creates an file_object object. What is an object?  You will understand in  Chapter 11, Class and Objects.  The Syntax is given as:

file_object = open(file_name ,access_mode)

The first argument,file_name, specifies the filename that you want to open. The second argument, access_mode, determines in which mode the file has to be opened, that is, read, write, append, and so on. 

The read() method

Now we will read a file by a program. The access mode for reading is r.

Let's take the sample of a text file containing famous quotes:

Sample file

I have saved the preceding file with the name sample1.txt.

Let's write a readfile.py program to read the earlier file: 

file_input = open("sample1.txt",'r')
all_read = file_input.read()
print all_read
file_input.close() 

In the given code, first we created a file_input file object, then we called file_input.read() to read...