Opening Files

The open() function lets us open an existing file or create a new file in Python. For either version of open() (new file or existing file), we need to specify the file name (with the file type extension) and access mode.

Core syntax for opening an existing file:

open(file_name.extension, access_mode)

The file type extension is the string of characters that follows the period after the file name. Examples include .py, .csv, .txt, etc. The types of file handling functions we are covering in this lab will generally only support reading and writing plain-text (or machine-readable) files.