This gist is an example of opening a file in read only mode, reading its contents and manipulating some standard string functions.

text1.py

a=open("text1.txt","r")
b=[]

for i in a.readlines():
    b.append(i)

if b.__contains__("hello"):
    print "Yes"
else:
    print "No"

for j in b:
    print b.strip("\n")

a.close()

text1.txt

hello

harshad

random