Open file and return a corresponding file object. If the file cannot be opened, an OSError is raised. See Reading and Writing Files for more examples of how to use this function.
file is a path-like object giving the pathname (absolute or relative to the current working directory) of the file to be opened or an integer file descriptor of the file to be wrapped. (If a file descriptor is given, it is closed when the returned I/O object is closed unless closefd is set to False.)
mode is an optional string that specifies the mode in which the file is opened. It defaults to 'r' which means open for reading in text mode. Other common values are 'w' for writing (truncating the file if it already exists), 'x' for exclusive creation, and 'a' for appending (which on some Unix systems, means that all writes append to the end of the file regardless of the current seek position). In text mode, if encoding is not specified the encoding used is platform-dependent: locale.getencoding() is called to get the current locale encoding. (For reading and writing raw bytes use binary mode and leave encoding unspecified.) The available modes are:
The default mode is 'r' (open for reading text, a synonym of 'rt'). Modes 'w+' and 'w+b' open and truncate the file. Modes 'r+' and 'r+b' open the file with no truncation.
As mentioned in the Overview, Python distinguishes between binary and text I/O. Files opened in binary mode (including 'b' in the mode argument) return contents as bytes objects without any decoding. In text mode (the default, or when 't' is included in the mode argument), the contents of the file are returned as str, the bytes having been first decoded using a platform-dependent encoding or using the specified encoding if given.
Note: Python doesn’t depend on the underlying operating system’s notion of text files; all the processing is done by Python itself, and is therefore platform-independent.
buffering is an optional integer used to set the buffering policy. Pass 0 to switch buffering off (only allowed in binary mode), 1 to select line buffering (only usable when writing in text mode), and an integer > 1 to indicate the size in bytes of a fixed-size chunk buffer. Note that specifying a buffer size this way applies for binary buffered I/O, but TextIOWrapper (i.e., files opened with mode='r+') would have another buffering. To disable buffering in TextIOWrapper, consider using the write_through flag for io.TextIOWrapper.reconfigure(). When no buffering argument is given, the default buffering policy works as follows:
Binary files are buffered in fixed-size chunks; the size of the buffer is max(min(blocksize, 8 MiB), DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE) when the device block size is available. On most systems, the buffer will typically be 128 kilobytes long.
“Interactive” text files (files for which isatty() returns True) use line buffering. Other text files use the policy described above for binary files.
encoding is the name of the encoding used to decode or encode the file. This should only be used in text mode. The default encoding is platform dependent (whatever locale.getencoding() returns), but any text encoding supported by Python can be used. See the codecs module for the list of supported encodings.
errors is an optional string that specifies how encoding and decoding errors are to be handled—this cannot be used in binary mode. A variety of standard error handlers are available (listed under Error Handlers), though any error handling name that has been registered with codecs.register_error() is also valid. The standard names include:
'strict' to raise a ValueError exception if there is an encoding error. The default value of None has the same effect.
'ignore' ignores errors. Note that ignoring encoding errors can lead to data loss.
'replace' causes a replacement marker (such as '?') to be inserted where there is malformed data.
'surrogateescape' will represent any incorrect bytes as low surrogate code units ranging from U+DC80 to U+DCFF. These surrogate code units will then be turned back into the same bytes when the surrogateescape error handler is used when writing data. This is useful for processing files in an unknown encoding.
'xmlcharrefreplace' is only supported when writing to a file. Characters not supported by the encoding are replaced with the appropriate XML character reference &#*nnn*;.
'backslashreplace' replaces malformed data by Python’s backslashed escape sequences.
'namereplace' (also only supported when writing) replaces unsupported characters with \N{...} escape sequences.
newline determines how to parse newline characters from the stream. It can be None, '', '\n', '\r', and '\r\n'. It works as follows:
When reading input from the stream, if newline is None, universal newlines mode is enabled. Lines in the input can end in '\n', '\r', or '\r\n', and these are translated into '\n' before being returned to the caller. If it is '', universal newlines mode is enabled, but line endings are returned to the caller untranslated. If it has any of the other legal values, input lines are only terminated by the given string, and the line ending is returned to the caller untranslated.
When writing output to the stream, if newline is None, any '\n' characters written are translated to the system default line separator, os.linesep. If newline is '' or '\n', no translation takes place. If newline is any of the other legal values, any '\n' characters written are translated to the given string.
If closefd is False and a file descriptor rather than a filename was given, the underlying file descriptor will be kept open when the file is closed. If a filename is given closefd must be True (the default); otherwise, an error will be raised.
A custom opener can be used by passing a callable as opener. The underlying file descriptor for the file object is then obtained by calling opener with (file, flags). opener must return an open file descriptor (passing os.open as opener results in functionality similar to passing None).
The newly created file is non-inheritable.
The following example uses the dir_fd parameter of the os.open() function to open a file relative to a given directory:
>>> import os>>> dir_fd = os.open('somedir', os.O_RDONLY)>>> def opener(path, flags):... return os.open(path, flags, dir_fd=dir_fd)...>>> with open('spamspam.txt', 'w', opener=opener) as f:... print('This will be written to somedir/spamspam.txt', file=f)...>>> os.close(dir_fd) # don't leak a file descriptor
The type of file object returned by the open() function depends on the mode. When open() is used to open a file in a text mode ('w', 'r', 'wt', 'rt', etc.), it returns a subclass of io.TextIOBase (specifically io.TextIOWrapper). When used to open a file in a binary mode with buffering, the returned class is a subclass of io.BufferedIOBase. The exact class varies: in read binary mode, it returns an io.BufferedReader; in write binary and append binary modes, it returns an io.BufferedWriter, and in read/write mode, it returns an io.BufferedRandom. When buffering is disabled, the raw stream, a subclass of io.RawIOBase, io.FileIO, is returned.
See also the file handling modules, such as fileinput, io (where open() is declared), os, os.path, tempfile, and shutil.
Raises an auditing event open with arguments path, mode, flags.
The mode and flags arguments may have been modified or inferred from the original call.
Changed in version 3.3:
The opener parameter was added.
The 'x' mode was added.
IOError used to be raised, it is now an alias of OSError.
FileExistsError is now raised if the file opened in exclusive creation mode ('x') already exists.
Changed in version 3.4:
The file is now non-inheritable.
Changed in version 3.5:
If the system call is interrupted and the signal handler does not raise an exception, the function now retries the system call instead of raising an InterruptedError exception (see PEP 475 for the rationale).
The 'namereplace' error handler was added.
Changed in version 3.6:
Support added to accept objects implementing os.PathLike.
On Windows, opening a console buffer may return a subclass of io.RawIOBase other than io.FileIO.
Changed in version 3.11: The 'U' mode has been removed.
open() returns a file object, and is most commonly used with two positional arguments and one keyword argument: open(filename, mode, encoding=None)
>>> f = open('workfile', 'w', encoding="utf-8")
The first argument is a string containing the filename. The second argument is another string containing a few characters describing the way in which the file will be used. mode can be 'r' when the file will only be read, 'w' for only writing (an existing file with the same name will be erased), and 'a' opens the file for appending; any data written to the file is automatically added to the end. 'r+' opens the file for both reading and writing. The mode argument is optional; 'r' will be assumed if it’s omitted.
Normally, files are opened in text mode, that means, you read and write strings from and to the file, which are encoded in a specific encoding. If encoding is not specified, the default is platform dependent (see open()). Because UTF-8 is the modern de-facto standard, encoding="utf-8" is recommended unless you know that you need to use a different encoding. Appending a 'b' to the mode opens the file in binary mode. Binary mode data is read and written as bytes objects. You can not specify encoding when opening file in binary mode.
In text mode, the default when reading is to convert platform-specific line endings (\n on Unix, \r\n on Windows) to just \n. When writing in text mode, the default is to convert occurrences of \n back to platform-specific line endings. This behind-the-scenes modification to file data is fine for text files, but will corrupt binary data like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be very careful to use binary mode when reading and writing such files.
It is good practice to use the with keyword when dealing with file objects. The advantage is that the file is properly closed after its suite finishes, even if an exception is raised at some point. Using with is also much shorter than writing equivalent try - finally blocks:
>>> with open('workfile', encoding="utf-8") as f:... read_data = f.read()>>> # We can check that the file has been automatically closed.>>> f.closedTrue
If you’re not using the with keyword, then you should call f.close() to close the file and immediately free up any system resources used by it.
Warning: Calling f.write() without using the with keyword or calling f.close()might result in the arguments of f.write() not being completely written to the disk, even if the program exits successfully.
After a file object is closed, either by a with statement or by calling f.close(), attempts to use the file object will automatically fail.
>>> f.close()>>> f.read()Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>ValueError: I/O operation on closed file.