Reading a File Line by Line — File Handling | IGCSE Computer Science

Exam Frequency Analysis

Past paper frequency (2018 to 2024)

This topic accounts for approximately 3% of your exam marks.

stable

Rare

Stable3%

OPENFILE, READFILE, WRITEFILE, CLOSEFILE pseudocode operations appear occasionally.

The most common file-reading pattern is to process every line, one at a time, until the end of the file is reached.

The EOF flag pattern

A standard CIE-style approach uses an end-of- flag (a Boolean) and a WHILE loop:

DECLARE EndOfFile : BOOLEAN
DECLARE Line : STRING

OPENFILE "students.txt" FOR READ
EndOfFile ← FALSE

WHILE NOT EndOfFile DO
   READFILE "students.txt", Line
   IF Line = "" THEN
      EndOfFile ← TRUE
   ELSE
      OUTPUT Line
   ENDIF
ENDWHILE

CLOSEFILE "students.txt"

How it works:

The flag EndOfFile is initialised to FALSE.
The loop continues while EndOfFile is still FALSE.
Each iteration reads one line into Line.
If the line is empty (an empty string), assume the end of the file has been reached and set EndOfFile to TRUE so the loop ends.
Otherwise, process the line (here, output it).

Why a WHILE loop, not a FOR loop?

A FOR loop is counter-controlled: you have to know in advance how many iterations to run. The program does not know how many lines a file contains until it starts reading. A WHILE loop with a condition that checks for end-of-file is the natural choice.