Saving long string in text file

Question

I have a long string that I want to save in a text file with the code:

taxtfile.write(a)

but because the string is too long, the saved file prints as:

"something something ..... something something"

how do I make sure it will save the entire string without truncating it ?

Did you try wrapping it with """ """ to use it as multi line? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10660435/pythonic-way-to-create-a-long-multi-line-string — dmitryro, Jun 25 '16 at 17:52
why do you think it will be truncated? Show the rest of your code — joel goldstick, Jun 25 '16 at 18:00
it seems as if this is just a representation in your IDE/terminal. have you confirmed the contents of the file after writing it? — Jordan Bonitatis, Jun 25 '16 at 18:06

Jordan Bonitatis · Answer 1 · 2016-06-25T18:24:58.047

I think this is just a representation in your IDE or terminal environment. Try something like the following, then open the file and see for yourself if its writing in its entirety:

x = 'abcd'*10000
with open('test.txt', 'w+') as fh:
    fh.write(x)

Note the the above will write a file to whatever your current working directory is. You may first want to navigate to your ~/Desktop before calling Python.

Also, how are you building the string a? How is textfile being written? If the call to textfile.write(a) is occurring within a loop, there may be a bug in the loop. (Showing more of your code would help)

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 02 '23 at 15:27

it should work regardless of the string length

this is the code I made to show it:

import random

a = ''
number_of_characters = 1000000
for i in range(number_of_characters):
    a += chr(random.randint(97, 122))
print(len(a))       # a is now 1000000 characters long string

with open('textfile.txt', 'w') as textfile:
    textfile.write(a)

you can put number_of_characters to whatever number you like but than you must wait for string to be randomized

and this is screenshot of textfile.txt: http://prntscr.com/bkyvs9

probably your problem is in string a.

Saving long string in text file

2 Answers2