introduction to filespaths and io also known as direct access as the computer program needs to know where the data is stored within the file and thus goes directly to that location for the data in some cases the location of the data is recorded in an index and thus is also known as indexed access sequential file access has advantages when program needs to access information in the same order each time the data is read it is also is faster to read or write all the data sequentially than via direct access as there is no need to move the file pointer around random access files however are more flexible as data does not need to be written or read in the order in which it is obtained it is also possible to jump to just the location of the data required and read that data (rather than needing to sequentially read through all the data to find the data items of interest files and / in python in the remainder of this section of the book we will explore the basic facilities provided for reading and writing files in python we will also look at the underlying streams model for file / after this we will explore the widely used csv and excel file formats and libraries available to support those this section concludes by exploring the regular expression facilities in python while this last topic is not strictly part of file / it is often used to parse data read from files to screen out unwanted information online resources see the following online resources for information on the topics in this