After spending hours coding, Alex finally managed to create a program that analyzes data and returns useful insights. However, he soon realized that the program requires him to input a lot of data manually each time he wants to run it, which is not only tedious but also prone to errors. He knew that he needed a way to read data from a file instead.
That’s when he remembered learning about file handling in Python. He quickly got to work and wrote a script that could read data from a text file and pass it to his program for analysis. Here’s a snippet of his code:
filename = "data.txt"
with open(filename, "r") as file:
data = file.readlines()
In the code above, Alex used the built-in function open() to open a file named “data.txt” in read-only mode. He then used the with statement to ensure that the file is properly closed after reading its content. The readlines() method was called to read all the lines of the file and store them in the data variable as a list.
Excited to see his program in action, Alex ran the script only to encounter an error. He realized that the file was not in the right format and that he needed to convert it to a suitable format before analyzing it. Fortunately, Python has built-in functions for reading and writing different file formats, including CSV and JSON.
Alex rewrote his code to read a CSV file instead of a text file. Here’s a snippet of his updated code:
import csv
filename = "data.csv"
with open(filename, "r") as file:
reader = csv.reader(file)
data = list(reader)
In the code above, Alex imported the csv module and used its reader() method to read the data from a CSV file named “data.csv”. He then converted the reader object into a list of lists, where each inner list represents a row of the CSV file.
Feeling proud of himself, Alex ran his program again and was delighted to see it work perfectly. He was amazed at how easy it was to read data from a file using Python and how it streamlined his workflow.
With his newfound knowledge, Alex continued to explore different file formats and discovered how to write data to a file using Python. He could now save the results of his program’s analysis to a file and easily share it with others.
In conclusion, file handling is an essential skill for any programmer, and Python makes it easy to read and write data to a file in various formats. With just a few lines of code, Alex was able to streamline his workflow and save hours of manual data entry.
