Welcome back to our series on File Handling! Today, we're covering Period 20, where we'll focus on the essential skill of writing data to text files. Our main goal is to help you create, open, write, and close text files efficiently.

The Writing Process

We'll start by discussing the process of writing data to a file. We'll cover how this process creates a new file if one doesn't exist and how it overwrites an existing file by default. We'll briefly mention the concept of appending to a file, noting that it's beyond the scope of this course but is a useful skill to be aware of. We'll focus on the write mode ("w"), which is crucial for our activities.

We'll review three key techniques for writing to a text file:

1. Writing a single string to a file.
2. Writing the contents of a 1D array to a file, with each element on a new line.
3. Writing data from parallel arrays to a file, which is perfect for saving structured data.

You'll get hands-on experience by typing up and testing the provided examples for each of these techniques. Then, you'll work on a practical application: Task 8, Problem 2 from "Software Design and Development Booklet v1.4.pdf". This task involves creating and writing data to a file named dogData.txt.

Differentiation & Assessment 🧑‍💻

For those who need a bit of extra help, we'll provide helper functions to make the file-writing process smoother. For those seeking a challenge, we'll ask you to think critically about how you would prevent overwriting an existing file if you intended to append to it instead. Your understanding will be assessed through observation of your practical coding and a review of your output for the file-writing tasks.