[EMAIL PROTECTED] said unto the world upon 2005-04-04 19:39:
<SNIP>
I want the "engine" to read the file, write its contents to another temporary file (for now it just writes the contents; later it will format it before writing the contents) and then deletes the *contents* of the temporary file after printing out the result, but not the temporary file itself. I want it to do this because that temporary file will be reused to write to for other pages as well.
In short, how might I go about deleting just the contents of a file? I tried several methods with my limited knowledge but had no luck.
Thank you very much for answering a lowly newbie's question. I really appreciate it.
P.S. If there's a better that you think to perform what I am saying, I'd like to be enlightened. But I'd also like my question answered too, in case I ever need to do something similar again.
Hi,
if I understand your question, I think the answer to how to delete will tell you that you don't need to worry about it.
>>> old_file = open(file_path_to_delete, 'w')
>>> old_file.write('')
>>> old_file.close()That will write an empty string to the file, erasing all its contents, while preserving the file in your file system (as one of 0 bytes).
So, I think this shows that your worry (at least as I understood it is misplaced. Unless you have a free space on the disk issue at hand, you don't need to bother with a delete step -- just open the file in write mode when you want to write to it again, and that will over-write any extant contents.
HTH,
Brian vdB
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