File iterators are best for reading lines
Content is strings, not objects
Files are buffered and seekable
Close is often optional: auto-close on collection
The following code begins by opening a new text file for output, writing two lines, and closing the file.
Then the code opens the same file in input mode and reads the lines back one at a time with read line.
The third readline call returns an empty string. And this is how Python file methods tell you that you've reached the end of the file.
Empty lines in the file come back as strings containing just a newline character, not as empty strings.
myfile = open('myfile.txt', 'w') # Open for text output: create/empty myfile.write('hello text file\n') # Write a line of text: string myfile.write('goodbye text file\n') myfile.close() # Flush output buffers to disk # from w w w. java 2 s .c om myfile = open('myfile.txt') # Open for text input: 'r' is default print( myfile.readline() ) # Read the lines back print( myfile.readline() ) print( myfile.readline() ) # Empty string: end-of-file