I have a simple program which opens a file and replaces text. However, I want the program to clear the file, then save what needs to be saved.
How do I do that? Or is there a simpler way to do so?
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Can you show some code of what you have attempted? – pczeus Feb 28 '16 at 03:50
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Does this answer your question? [How to erase the file contents of text file in Python?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2769061/how-to-erase-the-file-contents-of-text-file-in-python) – mkrieger1 Feb 08 '22 at 12:41
3 Answers
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When you open a file in 'w' mode, it's content would be erased.
from doc - 'w' for only writing (an existing file with the same name will be erased)
Just open file as
open(file, 'w')
AlokThakur
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If you open the file with mode w it will overwrite the file if it already exists:
with open('your_file', 'w') as f:
f.write('Some text\n')
This would create a file named your_file and write to it. If the file already exists, and you have permission to do so, it will overwrite the existing file.
You might also notice that I used open() within a with statement (context manager). This ensures that the file will be properly closed when execution leaves the scope of the context manager.
mhawke
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Is calling the `write` function - e.g. `f.write('')` - necessary if I wanted to clear the contents of the file? – Derek Kwok Feb 28 '16 at 03:58
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when opening in write mode, you clear the text in the file.
with open() as f:
f.write("")
that'll fix it for you!
Crashberry py
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Unfortunately this doesn't open a file in write mode. It isn't even opening a file at all. – mkrieger1 Feb 08 '22 at 12:38