Editing specific line in text file in Python

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You want to do something like this:

# with is like your try .. finally block in this case
with open('stats.txt', 'r') as file:
    # read a list of lines into data
    data = file.readlines()

print data
print "Your name: " + data[0]

# now change the 2nd line, note that you have to add a newline
data[1] = 'Mage\n'

# and write everything back
with open('stats.txt', 'w') as file:
    file.writelines( data )

The reason for this is that you can’t do something like “change line 2” directly in a file. You can only overwrite (not delete) parts of a file – that means that the new content just covers the old content. So, if you wrote ‘Mage’ over line 2, the resulting line would be ‘Mageior’.

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