Write to file python example

For writing to a file in Python, you would need a couple of functions such as Open , Write , and Read. There are majorly two types of files you may have to interact with while programming. EOL End of Line. Another type of file is called binary that contains machine-readable data. Only the application using it would know about its content. You first have to open a file in Python for writing.

Python provides the built-in open function. The open function would return a handle to the file if it opened successfully. It takes two arguments, as shown below:.

The first argument is the name or path of the file including file name. And the second parameter optional represents a mode to open the file. The default value is the READ only mode. It is optional to pass the mode argument. It means that Python will open a file for read-only purpose. Python provides two functions to write into a text file: Write and Writelines. This function puts the given text in a single line. Note: To know more about file handling click here.

Table of content Access mode Opening a file Closing a file Writing to file Appending to a file With statement Access mode Access modes govern the type of operations possible in the opened file. 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.

For an 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 exist. For an existing file, data is truncated and over-written. 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. Note: To know more about access mode click here. It is done using the open function. No module is required to be imported for this function.

Note: The r is placed before filename to prevent the characters in filename string to be treated as special character.

The r makes the string raw, that is, it tells that the string is without any special characters. The r can be ignored if the file is in same directory and address is not being placed. Open function to open the file "MyFile1. 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.

Skip to content. Change Language. Related Articles. Data Types. Control Flow. Open, Read, write and appending — general overview. In this tutorial, I am specifically explaining how to write content to a text file using Python. Without importing any module, you may use the open function and depending on the requirement for writing the content, you may specify the mode as mentioned below. Since this tutorial is about writing in the text file so I am not covering these values for the mode parameter.

The write function is used for adding new content to the specified text file. So, you do not want to lose existing content and just require adding the new content in the text file. This is where the append mode will work. The example below demonstrates how:. You can see, the existing content remains in the text file while new content is added at the end of that specified file.

You may learn about the with keyword in its tutorial. If file does not exist, a new file is created and as the final call is made for reading the content, it displayed only what we wrote by write function. The seek 0 is used to move pointer at the beginning of the file, otherwise, an empty string is returned.