Intermediate Programming with Python: Additional content

About Files

• Files store data on disk.
• They can be either text or binary files.
• Text files store text data in standard encodings that can be understood by many programs.
  • Often have name extensions that indicate the type of file, such as .py for Python scripts, .csv for comma-separated values data, and .txt for plain text files.
  • There are different encodings for text data that affect how the text is stored. Common encodings are ASCII and UTF-8. We will ignore encodings from here on.
• Binary files store binary data. Apart from conventions about the ordering of bytes on disk, binary files can have almost any internal structure.
  • There are some well documented binary file standards, such as PDF, and NetCDF.
  • However, frequently binary files can only be read by the software that created them.
• Python supports working with both binary and text files.

• We only explore working with text files here.

• Files are normally opened in text mode. By appending "b" to the mode, the file will be opened in binary mode.