Our examples so far that have touched the filesystem have operated entirely on text files without much thought as to what is going on under the hood. Operating systems, however, actually represent files as a sequence of bytes, not text. Reading textual data from a file is a fairly involved process. Python, especially Python 3, takes care of most of this work for us behind the scenes. Aren't we lucky?!
The concept of files has been around since long before anyone coined the term object-oriented programming. However, Python has wrapped the interface that operating systems provide in a sweet abstraction that allows us to work with file (or file-like, vis-à-vis duck typing) objects.
The open() built-in function is used to open a file ...
