How do I print the content of a .txt file in Python?

I'm very new to programming (obviously) and really advanced computer stuff in general. I've only have basic computer knowledge, so I decided I wanted to learn more. Thus I'm teaching myself (through videos and ebooks) how to program.

Anyways, I'm working on a piece of code that will open a file, print out the contents on the screen, ask you if you want to edit/delete/etc the contents, do it, and then re-print out the results and ask you for confirmation to save.

I'm stuck at the printing the contents of the file. I don't know what command to use to do this. I've tried typing in several commands previously but here is the latest I've tried and no the code isn't complete:

from sys import argv

script, filename = argv
print "Who are you?"
name = raw_input()

print "What file are you looking for today?"
file = raw_input()

print (file)

print "Ok then, here's the file you wanted." 

print "Would you like to delete the contents? Yes or No?"

I'm trying to write these practice codes to include as much as I've learned thus far. Also I'm working on Ubuntu 13.04 and Python 2.7.4 if that makes any difference. Thanks for any help thus far :)

Solution 1:

Opening a file in python for reading is easy:

f = open('example.txt', 'r')

To get everything in the file, just use read()

file_contents = f.read()

And to print the contents, just do:

print (file_contents)

Don't forget to close the file when you're done.

f.close()

Solution 2:

Just do this:

>>> with open("path/to/file") as f: # The with keyword automatically closes the file when you are done
...     print f.read()

This will print the file in the terminal.

Solution 3:

with open("filename.txt", "w+") as file:
  for line in file:
    print line

This with statement automatically opens and closes it for you and you can iterate over the lines of the file with a simple for loop

Solution 4:

to input a file:

fin = open(filename) #filename should be a string type: e.g filename = 'file.txt'

to output this file you can do:

for element in fin:
    print element 

if the elements are a string you'd better add this before print:

element = element.strip()

strip() remove notations like this: /n