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Yes, it would make it easier actually, you would just read the text file into a string:

with open('Path/to/file', 'r') as content_file:
    test_string = content_file.read()

Thank you for your reply, much appreciated! My python foo isn't very strong, but I'll give it a go and try out. Would be cool to have the ability to test it locally before publishing, just for fun.

Here is the code for this