Working with data objects

Description

Modules that deal with data usually consume and produce data objects, opaque objects that can be defined by one of the following Python objects:

An absolute or relative path which implements the os.PathLike interface.
A file-like object, most often an object which implements the io.IOBase interface.
A Python object, or reference to that object when writing, which consists in a sequence of bytes, such as a bytes, bytearray, memoryview or str.

A data object can contain binary or text data. Differences on the underlying Python object are shown in this table:

Variant	Binary mode	Text mode
path	`os.PathLike`	`os.PathLike`
file	`io.RawIOBase`	`io.TextIOBase`
bytes	`bytes`, `bytearray` or `memoryview`	`str`

Furthermore, data objects are either readable or writable.

Python API

The Python API used to handle data objects is agnostic to the underlying object.

# For readable objects

with obj.open() as handle:
  data = handle.read()

handle = obj.open()
data = handle.read()
handle.close()


# For writable objects

with obj.open() as handle:
  handle.write(b"Hello, world!")

# or

handle = obj.open()
handle.write(b"Hello, world!")
handle.close()