Opening & Closing Files in Python

Python provides simple and efficient ways to manage files. Working with files is an important task in any programming language because files help in storing data permanently. Python provides special methods and techniques to make this task easy.

File management means working with files, such as opening, reading from, writing to, and closing a file. In Python, files are of two types: Text Files and Binary Files.

In Python, the `open()` function is used to open a file. This function opens the file and creates a file object for it. The general syntax is `file_object = open("filename", "mode")`. The `mode` parameter determines how the file is opened (e.g., "r" for read, "w" for write, "a" for append, "b" for binary).

Python has several methods for reading a file: `read()` (reads the entire file), `readline()` (reads one line at a time), and `readlines()` (reads all lines into a list).

To write data to a file, `write()` and `writelines()` methods are used.

It is necessary to close a file after its use is finished to free up resources. The `close()` method is used for this. A better way to manage files is using the `with` statement, which automatically handles opening and closing the file.

When an error occurs while working with a file, such as the file not existing, an exception can be raised. For this, exception handling (`try-except`) can be used.