Easiest way to read write a file s content in Python

Question

In Ruby you can read from a file using s   File read filename   The shortest and clearest I know in Python is  with open filename  as f      s   f read     Is there any other way to do it that makes it even shorter  preferably one line  and more readable   Note  initially I phrased the question as  doing this in a single line of code   As pointed by S Lott  shorter doesn t necessary mean more readable  So I rephrased my question just to make clear what I meant  I think the Ruby code is better and more readable not necessarily because it s one line versus two  though that matters as well   but also because it s a class method as opposed to an instance method  which poses no question about who closes the file  how to make sure it gets closed even if an exception is raised  etc  As pointed in the answers below  you can rely on the GC to close your file  thus making this a one-liner   but that makes the code worse even though it s shorter  Not only by being unportable  but by making it unclear

User · Answer

This is same as above but does not handle errors   s   open filename   r   read

User · Answer

contents   open filename  read

User · Answer

This isn t Perl  you don t want to force-fit multiple lines worth of code onto a single line   Write a function  then calling the function takes one line of code   def read file fn                gt  gt  gt  import os      gt  gt  gt  fn     tmp testfile  i    os getpid        gt  gt  gt  open fn   w    write  testing        gt  gt  gt  read file fn       testing       gt  gt  gt  os unlink fn       gt  gt  gt  read file   nonexistant       Traceback  most recent call last                   IOError   Errno 2  No such file or directory    nonexistant              with open fn  as f          return f read    if   name         main         import doctest     doctest testmod

User · Answer

with open  x py   as f  s   f read        grins

User · Answer

contents   open filename    This gives you generator so you must save somewhere the values though  or   contents    line for line in open filename     This does the saving to list explicit close is not then possible  at least with my knowledge of Python

User · Answer

Use pathlib   Python 3 5 and above   from pathlib import Path contents   Path file path  read text     For lower versions of Python use pathlib2     pip install pathlib2   Then  from pathlib2 import Path contents   Path file path  read text     Writing is just as easy   Path file path  write text  my text

User · Answer

Simple like that       f open  myfile txt       s f read       f close     And do whatever you want with the content  s

User · Answer

Slow  ugly  platform-specific    but one-liner  -   import subprocess  contents   subprocess Popen  cat  s    filename  shell   True  stdout   subprocess PIPE  communicate   0

User · Answer

If you re open to using libraries  try installing forked-path  with either easy install or pip    Then you can do   from path import path s   path filename  bytes     This library is fairly new  but it s a fork of a library that s been floating around Python for years and has been used quite a bit  Since I found this library years ago  I very seldom use os path or open   any more

[python] Easiest way to read/write a file's content in Python

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