# Create a `BedTool`

First, follow the Installation instructions if you haven’t already done so to install both BEDTools and `pybedtools`.

Then import the `pybedtools` module and make a new `BedTool`. A `BedTool` object encapsulates all of the available BEDTools programs and makes them easier to use within Python. Most of the time when working with `pybedtools` you’ll be using `BedTool` objects. In general, a single `BedTool` object points to an interval file (BED, GFF, GTF, VCF, SAM, or BAM format).

    >>> import pybedtools

    >>> # use a BED file that ships with pybedtools...
    >>> a = pybedtools.example_bedtool('a.bed')

    >>> # ...or use your own by passing a filename
    >>> a = pybedtools.BedTool('peaks.bed')

This documentation uses example files that ship with `pybedtools`. To access these files from their installation location, we use the `example_bedtool()` function. This is convenient because if you copy-paste the examples, they will work. When using the `example_bedtool()` function, the resulting `BedTool` object will point to the corresponding file in the `test/data` directory of your `pybedtools` installation. If you would rather learn using your own files, just pass the filename to a new `BedTool`, like the above example.

You can use any file that BEDTools supports – this includes BED, VCF, GFF, and gzipped versions of any of these. See Creating a BedTool for more on the different ways of creating a `BedTool`, including from iterators and directly from a string.

Now, let’s see how to do a common task performed on BED files: intersections.