Further Programming

20.2 File Handling

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Candidates should be able to:
• Write code to perform file-processing operations
• Open (in read, write, append mode) and close a file Read a
record from a file and write a record to a file
• Perform file-processing operations on serial, sequential,
random files

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

Reading and Writing to text files in Python

Python provides inbuilt functions for creating, writing and reading files. There are
two types of files that can be handled in python, normal text files and binary files
(written in binary language,0s and 1s).
•Text files: In this type of file, Each line of text is terminated with a special character
called EOL (End of Line), which is the new line character (‘\n’) in python by default.
•Binary files: In this type of file, there is no terminator for a line and the data is
stored after converting it into machine understandable binary language.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

File Access Modes

Access modes govern the type of operations possible in the
opened file. It refers to how the file will be used once its opened.
These modes also define the location of the File Handle in the file.
File handle is like a cursor, which defines from where the data has
to be read or written in the file. There are 6 access modes in
python.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

File Access Modes

Read Only (‘r’) : • Open text file for reading.
• The handle is positioned at the beginning of the file. If the file
does not exists, raises I/O error.
• This is also the default mode in which file is opened.
Read and Write (‘r+’) : • Open the file for reading and writing.
• The handle is positioned at the beginning of the file. Raises I/O
error if the file does not exists.
Write Only (‘w’) : • Open the file for writing.
• For existing file, the data is truncated and over-written.
• The handle is positioned at the beginning of the file.
• Creates the file if the file does not exists.
Write and Read • Open the file for reading and writing.
(‘w+’) : • For existing file, data is truncated and over-written.
• The handle is positioned at the beginning of the file.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

File Access Modes

Append Only (‘a’) : • Open the file for writing.
• The file is created if it does not exist.
• The handle is positioned at the end of the file.
• The data being written will be inserted at the end, after the
existing data.
Append and Read (‘a+’) : • Open the file for reading and writing.
• The file is created if it does not exist.
• The handle is positioned at the end of the file.
• The data being written will be inserted at the end, after the
existing data.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

Opening a file
It is done using the open() function. No module is required to be imported for this function.

• The file should exist in the same directory as the python program file else, full address of the file
should be written on place of filename.

Here, file1 is created as object for

MyFile1 and file2 as object for
MyFile2

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

Closing a file
close() function closes the file and frees the memory space acquired by that file. It is used at
the time when the file is no longer needed or if it is to be opened in a different file mode.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File

Writing to a file
There are two ways to write in a file.
1. write() : Inserts the string str1 in a single line in the text file.

2. writelines() : For a list of string elements, each string is inserted in

the text file. Used to insert multiple strings at a single time.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Reading from a file
There are three ways to read data from a text file.
read() : Returns the read bytes in form of a string. Reads n bytes, if no n
specified, reads the entire file.
Note: ‘\n’ is treated as a special character
of two bytes

readline() : Reads a line of the file and returns in form of a string. For specified n, reads
at most n bytes. However, does not reads more than one line, even if n exceeds the
length of the line.

readlines() : Reads all the lines and return them as each line a string element in a list.

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Sample Programs

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Sample Programs

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Appending to a file

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Appending to a file

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Reading Word by word by using FOR loop

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Read character by character using for loop

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 20.2 File Handling – Text File
Read character by character using for loop

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 20.2 File Handling – Binary File
Candidates should be able to:
• Write code to perform file-processing operations
• Open (in read, write, append mode) and close a file Read a
record from a file and write a record to a file
• Perform file-processing operations on serial, sequential,
random files

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 20.2 File Handling – Binary File
Candidates should be able to:
• Write code to perform file-processing operations
• Open (in read, write, append mode) and close a file Read a
record from a file and write a record to a file
• Perform file-processing operations on serial, sequential,
random files

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 Getting & Resetting the Files Position

• The tell() method of python tells us the current position

within the file.
• The seek(offset[, from]) method changes the current file
position.
• If from is 0, the beginning of the file to seek.
• If it is set to 1, the current position is used .
• If it is set to 2 then the end of the file would be taken as
seek position.
• The offset argument indicates the number of bytes to be
moved.

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 Binary file using pickle module

Python has a module which will help us and is

extremely easy to use. This module is called pickle; it
provides us with the ability to serialize and deserialize
objects, i.e., to convert objects into bitstreams which
can be stored into files and later be used to reconstruct
the original objects.

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 Binary file using pickle module

Python has a module which will help us and is

extremely easy to use. This module is called pickle; it
provides us with the ability to serialize and deserialize
objects, i.e., to convert objects into bitstreams which
can be stored into files and later be used to reconstruct
the original objects.

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 Binary file using pickle module

pickle.dump() function is used to store the object

data to the file. It takes 2 arguments. First
argument is the object that we want to store. The
second argument is the file object we get by
opening the desired file in write-binary (wb)
mode. pickle. dump(sob, ofile)

Any data structure or class object File handler object

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 Binary file using pickle module

pickle.load()

pickle.load() function is used to retrieve pickled

data.The steps are quite simple. We have to use
pickle.load() function to do that. The primary
argument of pickle load function is the file object
that you get by opening the file in read-binary
(rb) mode. sob=pickle. load(ofile)

Any data structure or class object File handler object

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 Binary file using pickle module
Example Program

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