File I/O?

[leeor_net]

This might not be the forum for this question, but seeing that this is the only one I know with answers involving Python scripting:

What functions are there to input/output text/binary files? What are their prototypes?

Point of file i/o is because I want to be able to save a game in-progress… I imagine that storing various variables and even the information stored in the Scene Graph is easy enough to dump to a file and then parse back in… it’s now a matter of knowing HOW to write data to a file that’s cross-platform compatible.

[lvraab]

From the Python manual section 7.2 in the Tutorial section:

open() returns a file object, and is most commonly used with two arguments: “open(filename, mode)”.

f=open(‘/tmp/workfile’, ‘w’)
print f
<open file ‘/tmp/workfile’, mode ‘w’ at 80a0960>

The first argument is a string containing the filename. The second argument is another string containing a few characters describing the way in which the file will be used. mode can be ‘r’ when the file will only be read, ‘w’ for only writing (an existing file with the same name will be erased), and ‘a’ opens the file for appending; any data written to the file is automatically added to the end. ‘r+’ opens the file for both reading and writing. The mode argument is optional; ‘r’ will be assumed if it’s omitted.

On Windows and the Macintosh, ‘b’ appended to the mode opens the file in binary mode, so there are also modes like ‘rb’, ‘wb’, and ‘r+b’. Windows makes a distinction between text and binary files; the end-of-line characters in text files are automatically altered slightly when data is read or written. This behind-the-scenes modification to file data is fine for ASCII text files, but it’ll corrupt binary data like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be very careful to use binary mode when reading and writing such files.

[drwr]

Also see the Python manual for the pickle and cPickle modules.

David