I'm working on rewriting Python tokenizer (in particular the part that reads and decodes Python source file). The code is complicated. For now there are such cases: * Reading from the string in memory. * Interactive reading from the file. * Reading from the file: - Raw reading ignoring encoding in parser generator. - Raw reading UTF-8 encoded file. - Reading and recoding to UTF-8. The file is read by the line. It makes hard to check correctness of the first line if the encoding is specified in the second line. And it makes very hard problems with null bytes and with desynchronizing buffered C and Python files. All this problems can be easily solved if read all Python source file in memory and then parse it as string. This would allow to drop a large complex and buggy part of code. Are there disadvantages in this solution? As for memory consumption, the source text itself will consume only small part of the memory consumed by AST tree and other structures. As for performance, reading and decoding all file can be faster then by the line. [1] http://bugs.python.org/issue25643