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Importing entire text files

In this exercise, you'll be working with the file moby_dick.txt. It is a text file that contains the opening sentences of Moby Dick, one of the great American novels! Here you'll get experience opening a text file, printing its contents to the shell and, finally, closing it.

This exercise is part of the course

Importing Data in Python

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Exercise instructions

  • Open the file moby_dick.txt as read-only and store it in the variable file. Make sure to pass the filename enclosed in quotation marks ''.
  • Print the contents of the file to the shell using the print() function. As Hugo showed in the video, you'll need to apply the method read() to the object file.
  • Check whether the file is closed by executing print(file.closed).
  • Close the file using the close() method.
  • Check again that the file is closed as you did above.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Open a file: file
file = open(____, ____)

# Print it
print(____)

# Check whether file is closed
print(file.closed)

# Close file


# Check whether file is closed

Edit and Run Code