How to use files in Python
When we want to read or write a file (say on your hard drive), we first must open the file. Opening the file communicates with your operating system, which knows where the data for each file is stored. When you open a file, you are asking the operating system to find the file by name and make sure the file exists.
If the open is successful, the operating system returns us a file handle. The file
handle is not the actual data contained in the file, but instead it is a “handle” that we can use to read the data. You are given a handle if the requested file exists and you have the proper permissions to read the file. A text file can be thought of as a sequence of lines, much like a Python string can be thought of as a sequence of characters.In Python, we represent the newline character as a backslash-n in string constants.
Even though this looks like two characters, it is actually a single character.