Editing specific line in text file in Python

def replace_line(file_name, line_num, text):
    lines = open(file_name, 'r').readlines()
    lines[line_num] = text
    out = open(file_name, 'w')
    out.writelines(lines)
    out.close()

And then:

replace_line('stats.txt', 0, 'Mage')

you can use fileinput to do in place editing

import fileinput
for  line in fileinput.FileInput("myfile", inplace=1):
    if line .....:
         print line

You want to do something like this:

# with is like your try .. finally block in this case
with open('stats.txt', 'r') as file:
    # read a list of lines into data
    data = file.readlines()

print data
print "Your name: " + data[0]

# now change the 2nd line, note that you have to add a newline
data[1] = 'Mage\n'

# and write everything back
with open('stats.txt', 'w') as file:
    file.writelines( data )

The reason for this is that you can't do something like "change line 2" directly in a file. You can only overwrite (not delete) parts of a file - that means that the new content just covers the old content. So, if you wrote 'Mage' over line 2, the resulting line would be 'Mageior'.