Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

Reading a text file

Reading a file is as easy as writing from a file. To open a file for reading, we set the second parameter that is the access mode to "r" instead of "w". To read the data from this file, we use the read() method of the file handle object. Create a script called text_read.py and write the following content in it:

text_file = open("test.txt", "r")data = text_file.read()print(data)text_file.close()

Following is the output:

student@ubuntu:~$ python3 text_read.pyMondayTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFridaySaturday

In the preceding program, we've declared the text_file variable to open a file named test.txt. The open function takes two arguments: first, the file that we want to open, and second, the access mode that represents the permission ...