Python How-To

11 Dealing with files

This chapter covers

• Reading and writing files
• Processing tabulated data files
• Preserving data as files
• Managing files on your computer
• Accessing file metadata

Files are integral to any computer system or application. We use files to store data. We share data with our teammates by using files. When we obtain a file from others, we need to open the file, read its content, process the data, and write some data to another file or append data to the same file. These operations are concerned with the contents of the files. Our application can use hundreds of different Python objects, and some objects require excessive calculations or other processing steps, so it’s ideal that we can save these objects as files. When we need ...