Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language

Chapter 7. File Handling

• Writing and Reading Binary Data

• Writing and Parsing Text Files

• Writing and Parsing XML Files

• Random Access Binary Files

Most programs need to save and load information, such as data or state information, to and from files. Python provides many different ways of doing this. We already briefly discussed handling text files in Chapter 3 and pickles in the preceding chapter. In this chapter we will cover file handling in much more depth.

All the techniques presented in this chapter are platform-independent. This means that a file saved using one of the example programs on one operating system/processor architecture combination can be loaded by the same program on a machine with a different operating system/processor ...