Recipe for Reading and Processing a File¶

Here’s a foolproof recipe for processing the contents of a text file. If you’ve fully digested the previous sections, you’ll understand that there are other options as well. Some of those options are preferable for some situations, and some are preferred by python programmers for efficiency reasons. In this course, though, you can always succeed by following this recipe.

#1. Open the file with open

#2. Use .readlines() to get a list of the lines of text in the file.

#3. Use a for loop to iterate through the strings in the list, each being one line from the file. On each iteration, process that line of text

#4. Close the file with .close()

fname = "yourfile.txt"
fileref = open(fname,"r")   # step 1
lines = fileref.readlines() # step 2
for lin in lines:           # step 3
    ## some code that reference the variable lin
fileref.close()             # step 4