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Reading From a File

Python provides many different ways to read data from a file. You can:

• Read one line of data from a file;
• Read an entire file into a string;
• Read an entire file into a list.

	You cannot read from a file unless it has been opened. See Opening a File for details on how to open a file.

To read a line of data from a file, use readline:

myfile = open("myfile.txt", "r")
line = myfile.readline()

This function reads a line of data and returns it as a string. The line of data includes the trailing newline character.

	To remove the trailing newline character included by readline, use rstrip: myfile = open("myfile.txt", "r") line = myfile.readline() line = line.rstrip("\n") The parameter passed to rstrip is the two-character sequence \n, which represents the newline character. For more information on rstrip and other string editing functions, see the section on string editing.

The read function reads the entire file into a single string:

myfile = open("myfile.txt", "r")
line = myfile.read()

The readlines function reads the entire file into a list, with each line of the file contained in an element of the list:

myfile = open("myfile.txt", "r")
list = myfile.readlines()