File Handling with Python

Files help us store our data and information in a persistent way on a computer. The main memory (or RAM) is a
volatile memory that loses its data when power is switched off. In contrast, files are stored in secondary storage
devices such as hard disks, ssds, pen drives etc., and the data stored in files are not lost when the power goes off.

File types
There are many file types available, probably thousands, that store different types of data. For example text files
store a sequence of lines consisting of characters such as letters, numbers, and special characters. PDFs, word
documents, excel spreadsheets, image files, and video files are some examples of file types.

A file is identified by its name and the extension. Extension is the last part of a file name which is written with a dot
and few characters. For example .txt is the extension for text files. If we assume our file name is myfile.txt, myfile is
the name of the file and .txt is the extension.

Opening a file
Before performing any file operations on a file, the file needs to be opened. The open() function in python facilitates
opening files in Python. Open function opens the required file and provides us with a special pointer called a file
handle. A file handle is a special variable that links our python program to the file and helps us perform various file
operations.

While opening files, Python allows us to specify a file opening mode, which indicates the purpose of opening the file.
For example, we can tell python that we want to open a file only for reading or for both reading and writing.

To open a file, you must provide the name of the file that you want to open as a string. In addition to the file name,
you can also optionally specify the file opening mode. There are many file opening modes. The simplest opening
modes are read ‘r’ and write ‘w’, which opens the file for reading and writing, respectively.

Reading a file
After opening the file, the file content can be read using various python functions. read() function reads the whole
file at once whereas the readline() function reads the file line by line. To read a file, the file should be opened in read
mode and the opened file should be assigned to a file handle. While opening a file, if a mode is not explicitly
specified, Python opens the file in read mode.

While performing file operations that deal with files line by line, such as the readline() function, Python identifies the
end of each line by a special character called the newline character. Newline character is written as “\n” and is
placed at the end of each line. While printing a sequence of characters, whenever a newline character is
encountered, python goes to the next line before printing the next character.

Writing to a file
To write to a file, we have to open the file in write mode. To do that, we can spec the mode as “w” while calling the
open function. Once opened, we can use the function write() to write a given string to the file.

Closing a file
After we are done with the file operations, we should close the file we opened. Python may automatically close any
opened file when the file is reassigned to a different file handle. However, it is a good programming practice to close
the file after use. We can close any open file by using the close() function as shown in the example.
File handling errors
When opening files, we need to specify the file name, like we saw in the examples. This will only work if the file is
located in the current working directory.

If we want to open a file which is located at a location different from our working directory, we should give the full
file path as the file name.

Whatever the mode that we try to open the file with, you can encounter a situation in which the file you are trying
to open does not exist in the specified file path or the current directory.

In such a situation, depending on the file opening mode, python will take different actions.

If the file open mode is r, or read, python will show an error saying that the file cannot be found.

If the file open mode is w, or write, python will create a new file named with filename specified if it does not already
exist.