File HandlingLesson 49Free preview

Python Read Files

This lesson is part of Python · All levels

Summary

To read the file content, Python provides read(), readline(), and readlines() on file objects. read() takes the entire content or a number of characters, readline() takes one line, and readlines() returns the list of entire lines. For large files, reading per line with for is more memory-saving than loading them all at once.

Key points

F.read() returns the entire file content as a single string; f.read(n) limits the number of characters.
F.readline() reading one line includes the newline characters; called repeating means forward per line.
F.readlines() returns a list containing a string, one element for each line.
For large files use for lines in f: which read gradually without loading it all into memory.

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