 Welcome to the third lecture in the end-to-end machine learning course 112. Getting ready to learn Python, Windows Edition. This is for anyone who is very brand new to computers or brand new to coding, to know the very minimum amount of what you need to know to start writing your first line of Python. In this video, we are going to focus on creating and editing text files. This is super important because every Python file we write will be a text file. It will have some name and a period and a P-Y. That just shows us that it's a Python file, so we as humans can identify it. The computer doesn't care, it's just a text file to the computer. So all we need to start writing it is a program that can create and edit text files. In Windows, we have a text editor, which is a program that can create and edit text files, called WordPad. It's really nice because it's very simple, there's very little to get distracted by. And because we're just writing text for the computer to read, we don't need to worry about fancy fonts and formatting and all that stuff. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be clear. Clear to us. WordPad is a great bare bones text editor to get started in. To find it, you can go to your magnifying glass search window, type in WordPad, and the WordPad program, the WordPad app will pop up, you can double click it, and you get a little window that looks like this. This will be familiar if you've used a word processor of any sort ever, but you can just jump right in, start typing. This is a short text file, period. We can adjust the appearance, make it larger, make it smaller. The appearance is just for us, so it's whatever makes it easiest for you to read and edit and interact with. Computer doesn't care. After you're done typing, you can go in and save. Using this handy little selector, you can choose the directory you want to save it in. We'll choose the directory with several files in it, and you can also tell it the name that you want to save it as. We'll choose another text file, .text. Notice that there's a lot of different options under the save as type. There's Word documents, a rich text file, RTF. We don't care about any of these. We want it to be a text document. So it ends in .txt. Very simple, no frills, no embellishment, no assumptions, no special formatting. When we're done, we can click save, and this file then gets saved into our directory structure right where we want it, right where we told it to. We get a little warning. It says, hey, you're going to save this as a text-only format. This is going to remove any special fonts you had or formatting or bolding or italicizing or any of that stuff. We don't care. We want it to be simple. So you can say, yes, this is what we want. Now there's something that is a nice to have, and that is a fixed-width font. What that means is that every character, whether it's a capital W, which can be very wide, or a comma, which can be very narrow, they're all represented by the same width. So if I come here and I type 8 Ws, 8 Is, and 8 commas, notice they all line up. They all go the same number of columns. This is really good for text readability in Python. Highly recommended, but it's for you, for the writer, for the human. The computer doesn't care. So Courier New is a fixed-width text font. If we were to change this to be a different font, another font that I enjoy is Consulus, fixed-width again. You can see that the Ws, Is, and commas all line up perfectly. Totally a matter of personal choice. And if you want to dive into the world of optimal computer programming fonts, it's a fun little rabbit hole, but I believe all of them are fixed-width. So you can choose any fixed-width font you want, and it will work just fine. So for comparison, if we use Calibri, which is a default font for some Windows programs, you can see there's a huge difference. We have the Ws stretching really wide, and the Is and the commas are narrow and packed close together, which makes sense for readability because there's not as much going on there graphically, but it's terrible if you need your columns to line up. If you need to have the length of every 80 column line be the same. So that's why any fixed-width font is recommended. Now we have our short text file here. If we want to change it, add something to it, for instance. We can just go in now and add some more text, and here is some more text. We can save it out, reassure WordPad that yes, we do want to save just the text file. And then once it's saved, we have changed it. We have edited that text file. If we want to verify that it's there, we can open up Windows Explorer, go to Documents, Directory with several files in it, see another text file dot text, and we can open it up and see that it's there. And then once it's open, we can even add more. We can add extra text later if we want. This way we can continue to evolve whatever it is we're working on. So this is an important bit. This capability to create, to write, to edit, to come back and modify text files is really the nuts and bolts, the mechanics. It's like an important piece of what you need to sit down and write code. So you'll see very soon how this comes into play when you go to write your first line of Python.