Reading files in Python

Once a file object has been intialised with open() there are several ways in which the content can be read:

Read methodBehaviour
readReturn the entire contents of the file as a single string.
readlineRead the contents of a file a line at a time. You would combine this with a loop so that you can do something with each individual line.
readlinesReturn a list of all the lines in a file. Each line will be an element in the list.

Read

read reads the entire contents of a file and returns it as a single string.

read() reads the entire file into memory at once, so it may not be suitable for very large files that exceed the available memory of your system. In such cases, you can use the readline() method to read the file line by line instead.

The basic syntax is as follows:

# Open the file for reading
file = open('filename.txt', 'r')

# Read the entire contents of the file
contents = file.read()

# We could also limit the read to a number of characters:
contents = file.read(100)

# Close the file
file.close()

Once we have the file contents stored, we can then interact with it. The standard way of doing this is to parse it line by line. For example, say we were reading a CSV:

lines = content.split(',')
for line in lines:
    if line: # if the line is not empty
        # do something with line

Readline

The readline() method in Python is used to read a single line from a file. It is typically used when you want to process a file line by line, rather than reading the entire file into memory at once.

readline() returns the line including the newline character at the end of the line, so you may need to strip this character off using the strip() method before processing the line further.

# Open the file for reading
file = open('filename.txt', 'r')

# Loop through the file, reading one line at a time
line = file.readline()
while line:
    # Strip off the newline character
    line = line.strip()

    # Do something with the line
    print(line)

    # Read the next line
    line = file.readline()

# Close the file
file.close()

Readlines

The readlines() method is used to read all the lines of a file and return them as a list of strings, where each element of the list is a line from the file.

# Open the file for reading
file = open('filename.txt', 'r')

# Read all the lines of the file and store them in a list
lines = file.readlines()

# Loop through the lines and print them to the console
for line in lines:
    print(line)

# Close the file
file.close()
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