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Reading A Text File In Python

in this article, we will read the data from a text file in Python

Example

First, I have created a text file with the following content

Picture showing the sample text file with data

myfile = open("test.txt","r")
print(myfile.read())

In the above code, we are calling a method ‘open’ to open a text file. In the first parameter, we are passing the filename which is in the same folder as the Python program. Second parameter specifies the mode in which we open the file. For this example, we are opening the file in the read mode.

Once you run the program, you will get following output

Picture showing the output of reading the text file in python

Click to Enlarge

Specify The Number Of Characters In Read Function

You can also specify the number of characters you want to read from the text file. Consider the following example

myfile = open("test.txt","r")
print(myfile.read(10))

Here we are specifying that we are reading 10 characters. So, the output of the above code is

Click to Enlarge

Readline Function

From the readline function, you can read a single line from the text file. It also adds a blank line.

myfile = open("test.txt","r")
print(myfile.readline())

The output would be

Click to Enlarge

You can also specify the number of characters like we did in read function.

myfile = open("test.txt","r")
print(myfile.readline(10))

Click to Enlarge

Read Line By Line

Here is the code to read the text file

myfile = open("test.txt","r")
for line in myfile:
   print(line)

Here is the output

Picture showing the output of reading the text file line by line

Click to Enlarge

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Monday, March 4, 2019

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