Get me the file! - file(handle(r)s)

Step 1

Open a (new) file for writing using file = open(name).

Write the string "hello" to the file.

Don’t forget to close the handle.

Check the result.

Step 2

Get some lorem ipsum paragraphs (you can use this page) and add them to the file (by hand).

Open the file in python using with and write the contents to the console.

Step 3

Open the file, read the lines, write them back in reverse.

Since opening a file using open(filename, 'w') clears the file, you will often have to do this when you want to modify the contents of a file without overwriting everything.

Step 4

Often, you just want to add some content to a file, e.g. when you are logging the activitiy of your program.

Therefore, you can use open(filename, 'a'). This opens the file in append mode, which leaves the previous contents of the file untouched and simply appends your new content to the file.

Try now to append some text to the lorem ipsum file.

Decide on your own wether you want to use the context manager or manually open/close the file handle.

Step 5

Write the script so that it accepts a filepath as input¹.

Read stdin, half the lines and write the content into the file at the filepath we took as input.

Call the script with some input (unix pipeline is very useful). For example less lorem.txt | python3 script.py 'output.txt' with lorem.txt being the file containing test text.