Chapter 10: Files

While working with computers, we all have worked with files and directories. A file is “a collection of data or information that has a name.”¹ We can use files to store programs, text, and other structured information.

Throughout this chapter you will see files referred to as streams. You can think of a sequence of data arriving on a conveyor belt or like water in a stream. The file input/output methods we will be describing will work for many types of stream data.

Objectives

Upon completion of this chapter’s exercises, you should be able to:

• Employ files to retrieve and store plain text.
• Demonstrate different methods for reading sequential data.
• Modify an existing file to add new data to the end of it.
• Use Python’s context manager to manage a finite resource.
• Utilize data in the CSV format in a program.