CMSC 12 Foundations of Computer Science   Topic No.7: Files and Import 

 
FILES AND IMPORT 
LEARNING OUTCOMES 
At the end of this session, the students should be able to: 
1. Understand the use of files 
2. Use files and import in creating programs. 
 
CONTENT 
I. Usage of Files 
II. Writing to a File 
III. Reading a file 
IV. Using Import 

 
USAGE OF FILES 
We  only  use  variables,  lists,  and  dictionaries  to  store  data.  The  values  of  the  data  are only 
stored  in  the  main  memory.  As  we  observed,  once  the  program  terminates  all  the  data  saved  on 
our  variables  are  released  and  are  no  longer  in the program. Thus, we use files to save the data we 
obtained from our program. We can also reload the data from the files to our program. 
A file is a collection of bytes stored in a secondary storage device. 
 
WRITING TO A FILE 
01 fileHandle = open(“hello.txt”,”w”) 
02 fileHandle.write(“Hello World!”) 
03 fileHandle.close() 
The  following code would not print anything on the terminal. Hello World would be printed to a file 
named hello.txt.  
 
The general format of writing files is: 
<file handle variable> = open(<file name>, <mode>)
Example: 
fileHandle = open(“hello.txt”,”w”)
 
We  use  the  open  function,  we  save  the  data  to  “hello.txt”  and  “w”  is  write  mode.  If  we  want  to 
append we use the mode “a”. 
 
A er making a file variable, we can now use different file methods. 
<file handle variable>.write()
Example: 
fileHandle.write(“Hello World!”)

This is similar to print but it prints the string to the text file in the file handle variable. 
 
A er printing all the necessary data into our text file, we should always close our file handle. 

Institute of Computer Science | UPLB 2nd Semester 2018-2019

 
CMSC 12 Foundations of Computer Science   Topic No.7: Files and Import 

<file handle variable>.close()

Example: 
fileHandler.close()
This line is import to avoid data loss. 

TRY THIS! 
Make  a  program  that  gets  the  name  and  age  of  the  students  and  saves  it  to  a  file  “persons.txt”.  It 
must be delimited by commas. (separated by commas) 
Example: 
Perico, 21 
Kat, 22 
JM, 33  

READING A FILE 
01 readHandle = open(“hello.txt”,”r”) 
02 for line in readHandle: 
03 print(line[:-1])  
04 readHandle.close() 

The general format of writing files is: 

<file handle variable> = open(<file name>, <mode>)
Example: 
readHandle = open(“hello.txt”,”r”)
 
We use the open function, we save the data to “hello.txt” and “r” is read mode.  
 
A er  making  a  file variable,  we loop into the readHandle variable to show the lines and print it. We 
use print(line[:-1]) to trim the newline character (\n) from the text file. 
 
A er printing all the necessary data, we should always close our file handle. 
<file handle variable>.close()
Example: 
readHandler.close()
This line is import to avoid data loss. 

Note: File must exist so that it can be read by the program. 

TRY THIS! 
Make  a  program  that  reads  the  name  and  age  of  the  students  and  prints  its  contents  on  the 
terminal.  

USING IMPORT 
As  we  see  all  of  our  programs  is  located  at  a  single  file.  It  is  convenient  to  store  different 
parts of the program in different files for its readability. We can do this by using modules. 
   

Institute of Computer Science | UPLB 2nd Semester 2018-2019

 
CMSC 12 Foundations of Computer Science   Topic No.7: Files and Import 

Module is a python file that contains definitions(user defined functions) and statements.  
Import  can  be  used  to  access  functions  from  a  separate  .py(module)  file.  We  can  use  functions 
using this format 
 
Contents of name.py 
01 def getName(): 
02 name = input(“What is your name:”) 
03 return name  
04 def printName(name): 
05 print(“Hi your name is:”,name) 
 
Contents of main.py 
01 import name 
02   
03 givenName = name.getName()   
04 name.printName(givenName) 
 
TRY THIS! 
Transfer  the  read  and  write  functions  into  filereader.py  and  import  it  to  the  main  file  named 
main.py 
 
REFERENCES 
CMSC 11 PythonHandout 07 
JMJ Bawagan Teacher’s Guide   

Institute of Computer Science | UPLB 2nd Semester 2018-2019