DEV Community

Dead Simple Python: Working with Files

Jason C. McDonald on December 21, 2019

Like the articles? Buy the book! Dead Simple Python by Jason C. McDonald is available from No Starch Press. For me, any project doesn't start f...

Read full post

Sandor Dargo • Dec 21 '19

Nice and detailed article. I saw a typo that might be worth to fix. When you write about readline(), the section title is readlines(). So there are two sections called readlines().
Thanks for the post!

Jason C. McDonald • Dec 21 '19

Good catch! Fixing that now. Thanks.

Zachary Stone • May 24 '20

Would love to see the rest of the planned series! I'm sure 2020 has thrown your scheduling off. But I am really enjoying your teaching style and humor!

Jason C. McDonald • May 24 '20

Heheh, there's more coming, I promise! 2020 has indeed thrown me off, and I've been catching up on the book itself (which is 3/5 done). The latest plan is on the first post in the series.

Zachary Stone • May 24 '20

Excited to hear that! I tried my hand at teaching Python, but took the approach of teaching someone who doesn't know programming at all. So it's much more simple.

Hope all is well! Thank you for continuing to chip away at this series.

Korakot Chaovavanich • Dec 23 '19 • Edited

Please mention operator / in pathlib too.
Also, read_text() which is very convenient.

Jason C. McDonald • Mar 23 '20

Thanks for the suggestions. The book will go into more depth than I can explore in the article, and I'll be sure to include these in that!

KienTPhan • Mar 26 '23

In the bulletpoint "You must remember to close any file you open. You can do so manually with open(), or...", I think you mean close() right?

Humberto A Sanchez II • Dec 22 '19

Nice and to the point

Robert Nix • Dec 23 '19

In your examples of writelines(), you pass a list containing a single string element, but in practice, isn’t the usefulness of writelines() in passing several individual lines in a list?

Jason C. McDonald • Dec 23 '19 • Edited

Hmm, I appear to be doing exactly that? I'm not sure what you mean.

lines = [
    "Finally back safe and sound\n",
    "from one of the weirdest days\n",
    "at Gravity Falls.\n"
]
with open("journal3.txt", 'w') as file:
    file.writelines(lines)