Book Image

Python Fundamentals

By : Ryan Marvin, Mark Nganga, Amos Omondi
Book Image

Python Fundamentals

By: Ryan Marvin, Mark Nganga, Amos Omondi

Overview of this book

After a brief history of Python and key differences between Python 2 and Python 3, you'll understand how Python has been used in applications such as YouTube and Google App Engine. As you work with the language, you'll learn about control statements, delve into controlling program flow and gradually work on more structured programs via functions. As you settle into the Python ecosystem, you'll learn about data structures and study ways to correctly store and represent information. By working through specific examples, you'll learn how Python implements object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts of abstraction, encapsulation of data, inheritance, and polymorphism. You'll be given an overview of how imports, modules, and packages work in Python, how you can handle errors to prevent apps from crashing, as well as file manipulation. By the end of this book, you'll have built up an impressive portfolio of projects and armed yourself with the skills you need to tackle Python projects in the real world.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Python Fundamentals
Preface

Reading and Writing to Files


In the previous section, we mentioned that to create a file object, you can use the built-in open() function with a filename and mode parameter. But how exactly does that work? Let's talk a bit more about the open() method now.

The open() Method

The open() method is a built-in function in Python that you can use to read a file. It takes two arguments, the filename and a mode, for example, open(name_of_file, mode), and returns a file object that you can manipulate.

The mode passed to the function determines what kind of file object you will get back and what you will be able to do with it. Some available modes are as follows:

Figure 8.2: Available modes with open()

The preceding table lists the most important modes you will encounter. Some additional specialized modes are as follows:

Figure 8.3: Specialized modes with open()

Note

We will not be working with the binary modes for now, but feel free to play around with them in your own time. A good place to start is http...