Storing a Book Record in a File — 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.

Example — Write a pseudocode algorithm that prompts the user for a book's title and year of publication, then permanently saves the data by appending it to an existing text file called books.txt.

A full-mark answer:

INPUT Title
INPUT Year

OPENFILE "books.txt" FOR APPEND
WRITEFILE "books.txt", Title
WRITEFILE "books.txt", Year
CLOSEFILE "books.txt"

Mark-scheme split (typically):

Step	Mark
Input both the title and the year from the user	1
Open `books.txt` in an appropriate mode (APPEND keeps existing records)	1
Write the title and the year to the file	1
Close the file	1

Important: APPEND is the right mode here because the question says "permanently stores ... to the existing text file". Using WRITE instead would destroy the existing records.