Python Write Text File

Summary: in this tutorial, you’ll learn various ways to write text files in Python.

TL;DR #

The following illustrates how to write a string to a text file:

with open('readme.txt', 'w') as f:
    f.write('readme')Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Steps for writing to text files #

To write to a text file in Python, you follow these steps:

• First, open the text file for writing (or append) using the open() function.
• Second, write to the text file using the write() or writelines() method.
• Third, close the file using the close() method.

The following shows the basic syntax of the open() function:

f = open(file, mode)

The open() function accepts many parameters. But you’ll focus on the first two:

• The file parameter specifies the path to the text file that you want to open for writing.
• The mode parameter specifies the mode for which you want to open the text file.

For writing to a text file, you use one of the following modes:

The open() function returns a file object that has two useful methods for writing text to the file: write() and writelines().

• The write() method writes a string to a text file.
• The writelines() method write a list of strings to a file at once.

The writelines() method accepts an iterable object, not just a list, so you can pass a tuple of strings, a set of strings, etc., to the writelines() method.

To write a line to a text file, you need to manually add a new line character:

f.write('\n')
f.writelines('\n')Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Writing text file examples #

The following example shows how to use the write() function to write a list of texts to a text file:

lines = ['Readme', 'How to write text files in Python']
with open('readme.txt', 'w') as f:
    for line in lines:
        f.write(line)
        f.write('\n')Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

If the readme.txt file doesn’t exist, the open() function will create a new file.