Tommy B wrote: > I was wondering if there was a way to take a txt file and, while > keeping most of it, replace only one line.
<meta> This is a FAQ (while I don't know if it's in the FAQ !-), and is in no way a Python problem. FWIW, this is also CS101... </meta> You can't do this in place with a text file (would be possible with a fixed-length binary format). The canonical way to do so - whatever the language, is to write the modified version in a new file, then replace the old one. import os old = open("/path/to/file.txt", "r") new = open("/path/to/new.txt", "w") for line in old: if line.strip() == "Bob 62" line = line.replace("62", "66") new.write(line) old.close() new.close() os.rename("/path/to/new.txt", "/path/to/file.txt") If you have to do this kind of operation frequently and don't care about files being human-readable, you may be better using some lightweight database system (berkeley, sqlite,...) or any other existing lib that'll take care of gory details. Else - if you want/need to stick to human readable flat text files - at least write a solid librairy handling this, so you can keep client code free of technical cruft. HTH -- bruno desthuilliers python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for p in '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.split('@')])" -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list