Firstly, you have to open a file. You can do so with the built-in open() function. This function can take a few optional arguments, but the one argument you have to provide is the filename or path to the file. You should also consider the mode that you would like to open the file in. The default is read mode "r". In this mode you can pull information from the file, but you cannot write to it. Other useful modes include write mode "w", append mode "a", read-and-write mode "r+", read-and-write mode with truncation (see the next sentence) "w+", and binary read mode "rb". Note that both "w" and "w+" modes will blank out (AKA "truncate to 0") your file if it already exists so be careful using them. You can see all of the options in the documentation . So let's say you wanted to open a text file in write mode. You would do so with the line file_obj = open("/path/to/file", mode="w") From here you have a few options to write to the file. The easiest is the write() method. Here's an example use. file_obj.write("I taste a liquor never brewed\n") file_obj.write("From Tankards scooped in Pearl\n") file_obj.write("Not all the Frankfort Berries\n") file_obj.write("Yield such an Alcohol!") Notice that I have to end each line with a newline character \n because unlike say the print() function, write() does not automatically append a newline. Note however, that Python will often wait until it is "sure" that you are done writing to the file before actually pushing the text into the file. Until then it is stored in a buffer. The easiest way to ensure this happens is to close the file as soon as you are done with it. file_obj.close() Note that it is also useful to close a file opened in read mode if your program is going to be running for a while (for example, if it's running on a server) so that you also let Python's garbage collector clean up some memory required to keep the file open. Hence, when you open a file, you will almost always want to close it afterward. Since it is a very common error to forget to add that close() call, Python has our backs with an alternate way to both open and close a file. It's called a context manager and the syntax looks like this. with open("/path/to/file", mode="w") as file_obj: file_obj.write("I taste a liquor never brewed\n") file_obj.write("From Tankards scooped in Pearl\n") file_obj.write("Not all the Frankfort Berries\n") file_obj.write("Yield such an Alcohol!") # let's check if the file is still open print(file_obj.closed) # now let's check outside of the context manager print(file_obj.closed) Note that this is especially useful because that call to close the file will even get run if a runtime exception occurs. Reading a file has its own methods. Let's assume we've run the above code and created a file (make sure that you fill in "/path/to/file" with a filename that didn't previously exist before you run that code). Then we can read the whole thing into a string using the read() method. with open("/path/to/file") as file_obj: contents = file_obj.read() print(contents) We can instead read the file into a list of strings -- one for each line -- with the readlines() method or get just the next (starting with the first) line with readline(). I encourage you to test both of those methods out. However, one other very useful method of reading files in one line at a time is to use a for loop. with open("/path/to/file") as file_obj: for line in file_obj: print(line, end="") Exercise for the reader: see if you can reason out why I left out the mode argument to open() and why I specified end="" in the print() function based on what I've said so far. One final note: if you plan to do anything else to the file -- for example, renaming it, moving it, verifying it exists before opening it, etc -- then you can use the Path.open () method instead of the regular ol' open() function. Here's an example. from pathlib import Path file = Path("path/to/file") with file.open() as file_obj: for line in file_obj: print(line, end="") # and now that I've closed the file I can rename it or whatever References: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/inputoutput.html#reading-and-writing-files https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#open https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html Answer from Deleted User on reddit.com