Opening a file in Python is really simple. How do you create a file though that doesn’t exist?
If you use the open function in Python like so
open('file.txt')You’ll run into the error
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'file.txt'Mode for open a file
We need to understand that opening a file can be followed by a mode parameter, the signature for the function is open(file, mode).
If you only submit the filename the default mode is set to ‘read’ mode. Which only makes sense if the file exists. Here are the other modes
- r – open for reading (default)
- t – text mode (default)
- w – write mode
- a – append mode
- x – open file, failing if the file already exists
- b – binary mode
Open and create the file
Referring to the above table, we can use different modes for creating a file for the first time. Depending on our purpose if we want to delete an existing file with the same name or not.
Let’s try this
file = open('file.txt', 'w')
file.write('First line')
file.close()Do you want to know more about a Python topic? Contact us or leave a comment below :).