Directing print output to a .txt file

Give print a file keyword argument, where the value of the argument is a file stream. We can create a file stream using the open function:

print("Hello stackoverflow!", file=open("output.txt", "a"))
print("I have a question.", file=open("output.txt", "a"))

From the Python documentation about print:

The file argument must be an object with a write(string) method; if it is not present or None, sys.stdout will be used.

And the documentation for open:

Open file and return a corresponding file object. If the file cannot be opened, an OSError is raised.

The "a" as the second argument of open means “append” – in other words, the existing contents of the file won’t be overwritten. If you want the file to be overwritten instead, use "w".

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Opening a file with open many times isn’t ideal for performance, however. You should ideally open it once and name it, then pass that variable to print‘s file option. You must remember to close the file afterwards!

f = open("output.txt", "a")
print("Hello stackoverflow!", file=f)
print("I have a question.", file=f)
f.close()

There’s also a syntactic shortcut for this, which is the with block. This will close your file at the end of the block for you:

with open("output.txt", "a") as f:
    print("Hello stackoverflow!", file=f)
    print("I have a question.", file=f)