Reading & Writing Files
Working my way through Chapter 8 of Al Sweigart’s Automate the Boring Stuff With Python. As I’m just trying to do more observation in general, thought this was a good enough place to jot down a few things to help burn them into my memory.
First, a file path is just a string. For instance:
helloFile = open(‘/Users/al_sweigart/Desktop/hello.txt’)So often what we’re doing in this chapter is saving these complex file path strings to variables which can then be manipulated.
Some definitions:
Absolute path- includes the root
Relative path- no root, relative to cwd
3 “mode” arguments that can be passed to the open() function: read (‘r’), write (‘w’), append (‘a’). Write will overwrite previous data. Append just adds to the end.
read() method presents data as a string, readlines() presents it as a list, one string for each line of text.
The Shelf module can be used to store program data on the hard drive for use later. Similar to a dictionary, with key and value pairs.
The .. directory is the directory above the cwd (parent directory), The . directory is the cwd.
os.chdir(directory) = to jump to a new directory
os.getcwd = to find out cwdr
More to come tomorrow when I work on the Multiclipboard…
