Handling files

We have already covered the usual handling of files in Python when parsing our yaml configurations. The basic syntax is as follows:

with open("path/to/file/", "r") as file:
    file.read()

with open("path/to/file", "w") as file:
    file.write("file contents")

This is very easy to do when we have a file path we are defining ourselves. The problem comes when we want the user to be able to open any file, and save a new file to any location on their computer. In this case we do not have the exact path, and it isn't very user-friendly to expect the user to be able to type in the full path either.

Luckily, Tkinter has a module thatcomes to our aid in this situation: filedialog. The filedialog module comes with a few different methods that allow us to easily get full paths to files, both for opening existing files and saving new ones, all with a user-friendly GUI.

We will be using two functions in this module for our text editor:

• askopenfilename: This asks the user for an existing file...