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@section('title')
    Lab 11
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# Lab 11: File Operations

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## [Solutions](/content/labs/solutions/lab11/) 
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## Summary
Practice reading from files and writing to files



@include('/labs/_setup', ['folder' => 'lab11'])

@include('/labs/lab11/_toc')

## Big Questions {.bigqs}

- **What's the most important difference between writing output to the Canopy output window and writing output into a file?**
  <details class="answer">
    <summary>Show Answer</summary>
    Anyone who is familiar with Python programming will be able to see the
    output of a Python program. But even someone who knows nothing about Python
    might run a program and then look at a text file that it produced. So
    writing a file is a more general form of output that doesn't require
    familiarity with Canopy. Another important difference is that writing to a
    file can affect other parts of the computer: it's possible to destroy an
    important file by overwriting it.
  </details>
- **What's actually in a file when it's stored on your computer?**
  <details class="answer">
    <summary>Show Answer</summary>
    At a technical level, just bits: ones and zeroes. But in terms of how
    Python relates to files, those bits are assumed to represent characters in
    a string, so we can think of files as containing strings. Even an image
    file or a sound file can be thought of as just a very complex string.
  </details>

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