[Tutor] generating formatted output

[Rance Hall]

My app will be printing a series of documents that are the same each
time the doc is printed with the exception of the variables.  Sort of
a MailMerge if you will.

It seems to me that the easiest approach is to create a series of text
files with the layout and placeholders I need (again much like
MailMerge)

And then do something like this:

    file = open(fileName, "r") #Opens the file in read-mode
    text = file.read() #Reads the file and assigns the value to a variable
    file.close() #Closes the file (read session)
    text = text.replace(sourceText, replaceText)  #there will be a
series of these.
    file = open(fileName2, "w") #Opens a new file in write-mode.
    file.write(text)
    file.close() #Closes the file (write session)

Then you can print the file or email it or whatever you need to do.

There wont be too many of these replacements (think invoice template
with substitutes for customer information and a billing detail
section.)

So my question is about the approach.  Is this reasonable? Is there a
better way to do this?