Hi eveyrbody

Does paython open files in doc, pdf and html format?

I mean, for instance

file_input = open("file.doc", "r")
file_input_1 = open("file.doc", "w")


or do I have to stick to txt format?

Thanks

It reads the files as text only (in Windows there is a difference between "read" and "binary read"). Different formats such as html, pdf, doc are then achieved by creating the file with some structure that is known. For example html is plaintext where the content is put inside different kinds of tags, and the rendering application reads the tags, interprets them and displays content based on that. So you can read html files (for example, or any other files) in Python, but it will just read the contents and you will have to deal with the content type yourself - tell Python how and what to read and where, and how to represent it. There is no builtin "read pdf" or "read doc" thing, there could be a "library" or something for that if somebody had made it, but I'm not sure.

If it was that easy to read pdf/doc/... and even write, why would we pay for MS Office and such?

For Word document on windows, you can use COM object and the win32 module. See a sample here.
For PDF, you can use reportlabs third party library

Thanks for the answers.

Do you mean that
I need

?

I don't understand if the two ways are just one, or differ one from the other.
I don't need to change the files,or manipulate the strings in them, just read and extract some text.