How to read a text file in Python

1 min readDataGetting Started
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A text file is a straight text file, with non-structured data.

Text file can be like

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In molestie quam at tincidunt hendrerit. Aliquam mollis nulla nisl, vestibulum hendrerit velit ornare eu. Fusce lacus lorem, pharetra nec sapien non, feugiat aliquet erat. Mauris et nulla porta nisi aliquet molestie. Pellentesque ac quam elementum, eleifend nisl vitae, venenatis erat. In at facilisis velit. Vivamus sed dolor erat. Nam pellentesque enim ac tellus lacinia placerat. Sed sagittis ullamcorper diam ut tincidunt.
our file.txt

Reading it

To read it we use the open() function given a path and a method (here read by default).

# We use open to open an instance of the file
with open("path/to/file.txt") as file:
	text_content = file.read() # We read the document data

print(text_content)
Our code that will read the file.txt and print out its content

Here you are, you can now work with text data !

Writing it

If you want to know how to write a text file, I also wrote an article to show you how we can do it the simplest way.

How to write a text file in Python
Learn how to write a text file in Python in only 4 lines of code.
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