[Paul Moore on readline getting a record separator argument]
As a more general approach, would it be worth considering an addition to itertools which took an iterator which generated "blocks" of items, and split them on a subsequence?
Nope. Assign responsibility to the class that has all of the relevant knowledge (API for retrieving blocks, type of the retrieved data, how EOF is detected, etc).
It's a generalisation of the basic pattern here, and would be able to encapsulate the fiddly "what if a separator overlaps a block split" logic without locking it down to string manipulation...
How do you build, scan, and extract the buffer in a type independent manner? Are there any use cases for non-string data buffers, a stream of integers or somesuch? Raymond