Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How it works...

open acts as a context manager, returning the resulting object file. It's very convenient to rely on the context manager as, when we are done with our file, we need to close it and using open as a context manager will actually do that for us as soon as we quit the body of with.

The interesting part is that file is actually an iterable. When you iterate over a file, you get back the lines that are contained within it. So applying list to it will build a list of all the lines and we can then navigate the resulting list as we wish.