What is file I/O in Julia?

Overview

Julia is a high-level and dynamic programming language that supports file handling, that is, reading and writing files.

We can achieve this with the following standard functions:

• touch()
• open()
• read()
• close()

Creating a file

The touch function is used to create a file. The pwd() function can be used to check the current working directory, and the cd path function can be used to provide the path where the file is created.

# creating a file
julia> touch("demo.txt")

Opening a file

The open() function is used to open a file. The function takes in two arguments: filename and mode. The mode is r for reading and w for writing.

# opening a file
julia> book = open("demo.txt", "r")

This function can also be used to write to a file.

# opening file in write mode
julia> x = open("demo.txt", "w")
julia> write(x, "Hello, World!")

Reading a file

The read() function is used to read the entire content from a file. Again, from our previous example:

# reading a file
julia> data = read(book, String)

Closing a file

To close the file, the close() function is used. It closes the connection. Here, we close our demo.txt file:

# closing a file
julia> close(book)

We have a terminal below to test all the above commands: