Editing specific line in text file in Python

You want to do something like this:

# with is like your try .. finally block in this casewith open('stats.txt', 'r') as file:    # read a list of lines into data    data = file.readlines()print dataprint "Your name: " + data[0]# now change the 2nd line, note that you have to add a newlinedata[1] = 'Mage\n'# and write everything backwith 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'.

def replace_line(file_name, line_num, text):    lines = open(file_name, 'r').readlines()    lines[line_num] = text    out = open(file_name, 'w')    out.writelines(lines)    out.close()

And then:

replace_line('stats.txt', 0, 'Mage')

you can use fileinput to do in place editing

import fileinputfor  line in fileinput.FileInput("myfile", inplace=1):    if line .....:         print line