Why can't I call read() twice on an open file?
io, python
Solution
Calling `read()` reads through the entire file and leaves the read cursor at the end of the file (with nothing more to read). If you are looking to read a certain number of lines at a time you could use `readline()`, `readlines()` or iterate through lines with `for line in handle:`.
To answer your question directly, once a file has been read, with `read()` you can use `seek(0)` to return the read cursor to the start of the file (docs are here). If you know the file isn't going to be too large, you can also save the `read()` output to a variable, using it in your `findall` expressions.
Ps. Don't forget to close the file after you are done with it.
Problem
For an exercise I'm doing, I'm trying to read the contents of a given file twice using the `read()` method. Strangely, when I call it the second time, it doesn't seem to return the file content as a string? Here's the code ``` f = f.open() # get the year match = re.search(r'Popularity in (\d+)', f.read()) if match: print match.group(1) # get all the names matches = re.findall(r'<td>(\d+)</td><td>(\w+)</td><td>(\w+)</td>', f.read()) if matches: # matches is always None ``` Of course I know that this is not the most efficient or best way, this is not the point here. The point is, why can't I call `read()` twice? Do I have to reset the file handle? Or close / reopen the file in order to do that?