File Processing: A Python Guide to Reading and Summing Numbers from a Text File

Learn How to Create a Python Program That Reads a File and Calculates the Sum of Numbers

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll explore a Python programming problem that involves writing a program to read a known filename f1.txt containing a single column of numbers in Python syntax. Your task is to display the sum of these numbers.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a better understanding of how to work with files, read and process numbers, and create efficient algorithms for calculating the sum of numbers from a file.

Step 1: Opening the File

First, let’s open the file f1.txt using the open() function in Python. We’ll use the with statement to ensure that the file is properly closed after we’re done processing it:

with open('f1.txt', 'r') as file:
    # Read and process the numbers from the file

Step 2: Initializing the Sum

Inside the with statement, we’ll initialize a variable called sum_of_numbers to 0. This variable will store the sum of numbers read from the file:

sum_of_numbers = 0