As a complete beginner to programming, I am trying to understand the basic concepts of opening and closing files. One exercise I am doing is creating a script that allows me to copy the contents from one file to another.
in_file = open(from_file)
indata = in_file.read()
out_file = open(to_file, 'w')
out_file.write(indata)
out_file.close()
in_file.close()
I have tried to shorten this code and came up with this:
indata = open(from_file).read()
open(to_file, 'w').write(indata)
This works and looks a bit more efficient to me. However, this is also where I get confused. I think I left out the references to the opened files; there was no need for the in_file and out_file variables. However, does this leave me with two files that are open, but have nothing referring to them? How do I close these, or is there no need to?
Any help that sheds some light on this topic is much appreciated.