Question

I’m trying to open a .txt file in Python with the following function.

def get_my_string():
   """Returns a string of the text"""
   f = open("/home/Documents/text.txt", 'r')
   string = str(f.read())
   f.close()
   return string

I want “string” to be a string of the text from the opened file. However, after calling the function above, “string” is an empty list.

Answer 1

def get_my_string():
    """Returns the file inputFn"""

    inputFn = "/home/Documents/text.txt"

    try:
        with open(inputFn) as inputFileHandle:
            return inputFileHandle.read()

    except IOError:
        sys.stderr.write( "[myScript] - Error: Could not open %s\n" % (inputFn) )
        sys.exit(-1)