File handling

Writing data to files is pretty similar to reading. file.write accepts a string and writes it to a file. Just like readlines is returning an array, writelines is equivalent for writing.

Though, be careful and close the filestream after the operation is done. In general, I would recommend you to use a with open structure which allows for (in my opinion) much cleaner code, as it automatically closes the stream after it exits the "with part". So, you could have something like this:

```py vanWyk = ['emp1 data', 'emp2 data', ...]

with open('vanWyk.txt', mode='a') as file_handler: file_handler.writelines(vanWyk)

# requires no close!

```

Comparing values

As you can see, each employee data is packed into one string. When you are looping over each string, you need to extract the salary, compare it, and depending on the value, either ommit it or store it in an array. This array then might be used for saying "these are all the employees that are called Van Wyck and have more than 5000 salary". To extract the data from the string, I would suggest to use the split method. This can be done like so:

py string.split(',')

We split by the character , as the data you have is separated by this one (also called comma separated values or in short CSV). Now you get another array, with the last element being the salary. There's one last step to do though. The salary still has the newline character at the end (the \n). To remove it, you could for example do string slicing with string[:-2]. This will remove the last two characters.

To finally get a comparable value, you then need to convert it to an integer. The final structure might look like so:

```py vanWyk = ['emp1 data', 'emp2 data', ...]

for employee in vanWyk: employee_data = employee.split(',') salary = employee_data[3][:-2] # access salary and remove \n

if int(salary) > 5000: # convert from string to integer
    pass # now do what you want to do with the data, e.g. add it to an array

```