Question

What’s the difference between file and open in Python? When should I use which one? (Say I’m in 2.5)

Answer 1

You should always use open().

As the documentation states:

When opening a file, it’s preferable to use open() instead of invoking this constructor directly. file is more suited to type testing (for example, writing ‘isinstance(f, file)’).

Also, file() has been removed since Python 3.0.