Deleting File Lines in Python

Question

I am trying to create a program that takes in a username and high score, if they are already a user they update to their new high score or just adds the high score if not.

Answer 1

I'd advise you to move to some standard format of saving information, such as JSON, YAML, XML, CSV, pickle or another. Then what you need is to read and parse the file into native data structure (probably dict in the case), modify it (it is trivial), and write it back.

Example with json (human readable, quite easy to use):

import json

# loading data
try:
    with open("data") as a:
        b = json.load(a) # b is dict
except FileNotFoundError:
    b = {}

# user 
name = input("What's your name? ")
score = int(input("What's your high score? "))

# manipulating data
b[name] = score

# writing back 
with open("data", "w") as a:
    json.dump(b, a)

Example with shelve (not human-readable, but extremely easy to use):

import shelve

name = input("What's your name? ")
score = int(input("What's your high score? "))

with shelve.open("bin-data") as b:
    b[name] = score # b is dict-like