Hi, I just want to make a quick note about opening and handling files in Windows. Because I've seen this issue come up a few times when providing the file path to the open function. Python has a set of special characters also called escape sequences. Like for instance, backslash n for a new line, backslash T for tab, or backslash capital U for Unicode characters, among others. When used inside the windows path, these special sequences will generate an exception and you want to be able to open and read your files. To better see this using an example I've created a txt file right here inside the folder on my Windows desktop.

The file is called txt dot txt and the folder in which it resides is called New. Now let's open up idle and try to open this file using the open function. So I'm going to write f equal Open, open and close parentheses, open and close double quotes for the path. C, colon backslash users, backslash, my user name, backslash, desktop, backslash new the name of the folder and finally test dot txt. And I'm going to open this file for reading, which is anyways, the default mode. Now let's try to spot any of Python special characters here.

So we have backslash you, for Unicode, backslash, T for tab, backslash n for a new line. And finally, backslash, D, once again, unless we fix this path, we want to be able to open this file. So let me prove this to you. I'm going to run this line of code, enter. Immediately we get a syntax error exception, and Python is unable to open the file properly. To fix this behavior, you always need to escape all the backslash Inside the windows path by using an additional backslash.

So for each backslash in this path, I'm going to insert another backslash before it to make sure that there aren't any special characters in the path that might generate an exception. To play this safe, always escape all the backslashes in your path. So let me try this for my path. I'm going to insert an additional backslash for each existing backslash. Now when executing this line of code, no more exceptions are raised. And if we now try to read the contents of the file, so f dot read, the operation is done successfully.

So keep this in mind whenever you are working with Windows file paths in your Python applications. I hope you found this video useful and I'll see you in the next one.