What needs to be done at the very beginning when reading a file?

It is necessary to open the file in the appropriate mode: read, write, append, or binary.

# Opening a file for reading in text mode (UTF-8)
f = open('my_file.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8')

# Opening a file for writing in binary mode
binary_file = open('binary_data.bin', 'wb')

It is important to use the with context manager so that the file is automatically closed after operations are completed, even if an error occurs.

with open('my_file.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    # Reading the contents of the file
    content = f.read()
    # Further operations with content

# The file f is automatically closed after exiting the with block