Reading entire file content in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reading entire file content

📖 Scenario: You have a text file named example.txt that contains some lines of text. You want to read all the content from this file at once.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to open a file, read its entire content into a variable, and then display it.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable with the exact filename example.txt

Open the file using the open function with the correct mode

Read the entire content of the file into a variable called content

Print the content variable to display the file's text

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading files is common when you want to process data stored in text files, like logs, reports, or configuration files.

💼 Career

Many programming jobs require reading and processing files to handle data input, configuration, or user content.

1

Create a variable with the filename

Create a variable called filename and set it to the string 'example.txt'.

Python

filename = 'example.txt'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use single or double quotes to create the string.

2

Open the file for reading

Use the open function with the variable filename and mode 'r' to open the file. Assign the result to a variable called file.

Python

filename = 'example.txt'
file = open(filename, 'r')
# Your code here

Need a hint?

The mode 'r' means read-only.

3

Read the entire content of the file

Use the read() method on the file object to read all content. Store it in a variable called content. Then close the file using file.close().

Python

filename = 'example.txt'
file = open(filename, 'r')
content = file.read()
file.close()
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to close the file after reading to free resources.

4

Print the file content

Write a print statement to display the variable content.

Python

filename = 'example.txt'
file = open(filename, 'r')
content = file.read()
file.close()
print(content)
# Your code here

Need a hint?

The output should show all text inside example.txt.