How to create a new text file using Python

Question

I'm practicing the management of .txt files in python. I've been reading about it and found that if I try to open a file that doesn't exists yet it will create it on the same directory from where the program is being executed. The problem comes that when I try to open it, I get this error:

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\Users\myusername\PycharmProjects\Tests\copy.txt'.

I even tried specifying a path as you can see in the error.

import os THIS_FOLDER = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)) my_file = os.path.join(THIS_FOLDER, 'copy.txt') 

Answer 1

Looks like you forgot the mode parameter when calling open, try w:

with open("copy.txt", "w") as file:     file.write("Your text goes here") 

The default value is r and will fail if the file does not exist

'r' open for reading (default) 'w' open for writing, truncating the file first 

Other interesting options are

'x' open for exclusive creation, failing if the file already exists 'a' open for writing, appending to the end of the file if it exists 

See Doc for Python2.7 or Python3.6

Answer 2

# Method 1 f = open("Path/To/Your/File.txt", "w")   # 'r' for reading and 'w' for writing f.write("Hello World from " + f.name)    # Write inside file  f.close()                                # Close file   # Method 2 with open("Path/To/Your/File.txt", "w") as f:   # Opens file and casts as f      f.write("Hello World form " + f.name)       # Writing     # File closed automatically 

There are many more methods but these two are most common. Hope this helped!