I want to read a file, sort text inside the file and overwrite the contents of the file with sorted text.
I have been able to read and sort text, but not sure how to clear contents of the file before writing the sorted text to the file
WL01 = 'Test.txt'
with open(WL01,'r+') as WL:
lines = WL.readlines()
lines.sort()
WL.truncate()
for line in lines:
print(line, file = WL)
You are close, just need to return the pointer to the beginning of the file using the seek function, so your code looks like:
WL01 = 'Test.txt'
with open(WL01, 'r+') as WL:
lines = WL.readlines()
lines.sort()
WL.seek(0)
WL.truncate()
for line in lines:
WL.write(line)
you can use the truncate() method with a size of 0 and after calling truncate(0), the file pointer will be at the end of the file, so it is necessary to use the seek(0) method to move the file pointer back to the beginning of the file before writing the sorted text!
check this out:
WL01 = 'Test.txt'
with open(WL01, 'r+') as WL:
lines = WL.readlines()
lines.sort()
WL.truncate(0) #clear the contents of the file!!!
WL.seek(0) #move the file pointer to the beginning of the file
for line in lines:
WL.write(line)
