Reading files

301.15 File Handling Techniques

File Handling Techniques — Note 2 of 4

Read lines or whole file.

What you need to know

You can read a whole file at once with .read(), get a list of lines with .readlines(), or loop through line by line with a for loop. Each line includes a newline character.

What to know

.read() returns the entire file as one string
.readlines() returns a list of lines
for line in f: loops one line at a time
Use .strip() to remove trailing newline from each line

Code examples

Reading lines

python

with open("names.txt", "r") as f:
    for line in f:
        name = line.strip()
        print("Hello, " + name)

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Specification notes for programming are in Paper 2.