Pathlib has nice shortcuts for reading and writing to files

TIL: If you use pathlib to work with files, you can use the read_text and write_text methods to read and write to files. This is a nice alternative to using open() and close() directly.

It used to be that if you wanted to read and write to a file, you would do something like this:

with open("example.txt", "r") as f:
    text = f.read()

with open("example.txt", "w") as f:
    f.write(text + " (updated)")

But with pathlib, you can do this instead:

from pathlib import Path

path = Path("example.txt")
text = path.read_text()
path.write_text(text + " (updated)")

Using pathlib is not only more concise but also handles file opening and closing for you, ensuring proper resource management.

Behind the Scenes

From the pathlib source code, you can see that read_text and write_text methods using context managers to open and close the files, so you don’t have to worry about it:

def read_text(self, encoding=None, errors=None, newline=None):
    """
    Open the file in text mode, read it, and close the file.
    """
    with self.open(mode='r', encoding=encoding, errors=errors, newline=newline) as f:
        return f.read()

def write_text(self, data, encoding=None, errors=None, newline=None):
    """
    Open the file in text mode, write to it, and close the file.
    """
    if not isinstance(data, str):
        raise TypeError('data must be str, not %s' % data.__class__.__name__)
    with self.open(mode='w', encoding=encoding, errors=errors, newline=newline) as f:
        return f.write(data)