6. Automating file handling tasks

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Have you ever had to work with a bunch of files—maybe organizing, compressing, or moving them around? Manually handling files can be time-consuming and boring. Luckily, Python can automate a lot of these tasks for you!

Compressing files with zipfile

Imagine you have a folder full of files, and you want to send them to a friend. Instead of attaching them one by one, you can zip them up into a single .zip file. Python’s zipfile module makes this super easy:

• Creating a ZIP file: You can take multiple files and compress them into a .zip file to save space.
• Extracting a ZIP file: Need to get the files back? Python lets you unzip them with just a few lines of code!
• Adding files to an existing ZIP: You can keep adding files to a ZIP archive without creating a new one.

Automating file handling with Python scripts

Python can automatically organize your files based on their type, name, or content. For example:

• Moving files: Organize files into folders based on their extensions (e.g., put .jpg files into a "Photos" folder).
• Renaming files: Want to rename 100 files at once? Python can do it in seconds!
• Deleting old files: Set up a script to clean up files older than 30 days.

This is super useful for tasks like backing up important files or sorting downloads automatically.

Best practices for large file processing

When dealing with huge files, we need to be smart about how we handle them:

• Process files in chunks instead of reading everything at once to avoid memory overload.
• Use generators to process lines one by one rather than loading the whole file into memory.
• Work with compressed files directly (e.g., reading .zip files without extracting them).

With these tricks, Python can efficiently handle gigabytes of data without slowing down your computer.