Detecting the first time I open/append to a file

[Sean Davis]

On Sep 23, 2:02 pm, tkp... at hotmail.com wrote:
> I have a simulation that runs many times with different parameters,
> and I want to aggregate the output into a  single file with one rub: I
> want a header to be written only the first time. My program looks a
> bit like this:
>
> def main():
>     for param in range(10):
>         simulate(param)
>
> def simulate(parameter):
>     'Lots of code followed by:
>     with open(summaryFn, 'ab') as f:
>         writer = csv.writer(f)
>         writer.writerow(header)
>         writer.writerow(Sigma)
>
> If I can sense that the file is being created in the first iteration,
> I can then use an if statement to decide whether or not I need to
> write the header. Question: how can I tell if the file is being
> created or if this its the first iteration? It's unrealistic to test
> the value of the parameter as in the real problem, there are many
> nested loops in main, and the bounds on the loop indices may change.

You could use os.path.exists() to check if the file is there.
However, the file could have been left over from a previous execution,
etc.  What might make sense is to open the file only once, store the
file handle, and write to that throughout the execution.

Sean