Basic File Operations in Python
In the previous topic, we investigated a few advanced data structures and also learned neat and useful functional programming methods to manipulate them without side effects. In this topic, we will learn about a few OS-level functions in Python, such as working with files, but these could also include working with printers, and even the internet. We will concentrate mainly on file-related functions and learn how to open a file, read the data line by line or all at once, and finally, how to cleanly close the file we opened. The closing operation of a file should be done cautiously, which is ignored most of the time by developers. When handling file operations, we often run into very strange and hard-to-track-down bugs because a process opened a file and did not close it properly. We will apply a few of the techniques we have learned about to a file that we will read to practice our data wrangling skills further.
Exercise 2.08: File Operations
In...