First learning: be explicit in PyCharm. I was using the following to work with reading a file using readlines() sonnetFile = open ( '/home/csaunderson/learning/sonnet29.txt' ) sonnetFile.readlines() which returned correctly in IDLE: >>> sonnetFile = open('/home/csaunderson/learning/sonnet29.txt') >>> sonnetFile.readlines() ["When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,\n", 'I all alone beweep my outcast state,\n', 'And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,\n', 'And look upon myself and curse my fate,\n'] But in PyCharm, it returned simply a return code zero, which is success, but failure. Instead, I had to explicitly print() the output: sonnetFile = open ( '/home/csaunderson/learning/sonnet29.txt' ) print (sonnetFile.readlines()) Which then gave me: /home/csaunderson/PycharmProjects/learning/venv/bin/python /home/csaunderson/learning/first_readlines.py ["When, in disgrace with ...