Hello lads!




I'm having some trouble with file management in Python and I'm hoping someone here can help me.




I'm working on a script that reads and writes data to a file. The problem is that when I try to write data to the file, it seems to overwrite the existing content instead of adding to it. Here's a simplified version of my code:

# Writing to a file
with open('data.txt', 'w') as file:
    file.write('New content')

I'm using "w" mode because I want to make sure the file is updated with the latest content. However, I expected it to overwrite the content, not add it. I thought "w" mode was supposed to handle this, but it looks like it might do the opposite.




I also check this: http://www.python.it/forum/thread/6940/lettura-di-un-file-csv-da-google-sheetsgenerativeai But I didn't find any solution. Could someone point me to the best solution for this? Can someone explain if this is the expected behavior or if I might be misunderstanding how the file modes work? Also, what would be the correct mode if I wanted to add content without overwriting existing data?




Thanks in advance for any help!

Hey there!

It looks like there's a bit of confusion about the file modes in Python.

- w: Opens the file for writing. If the file already exists, it overwrites the existing content. If the file does not exist, it creates a new one. This is what is happening in your script: you are overwriting the entire content of the file with the string 'New content'.

- a: Opens the file in append mode. If the file exists, the new content is added to the end of the file, without overwriting the existing content. If the file does not exist, it creates a new one.
If you want to add content to the file without overwriting what's already there, you should use the 'a' (append) mode instead of 'w'.

Here’s how your code could look:

# Adding content to a file
with open('data.txt', 'a') as file:
    file.write('New content\n')

Have fun.