It seems there could be a cleaner way of reading the first n lines of a file and additionally not seeking past those lines (ie peek). This is obviously a trivial task for 1 line ie... f.readline() f.seek(0) but one that I think would make sense to add to the IO implementation, given that we already have readline, readlines, and peek I think peekline() or peeklines(n) is only a natural addition. The argument for doing so (in 3.3 of course), is primarily readability but also that the maintenance burden *seems* like it would be low. This addition would also be helpful and more concise where n > 1.
I think readlines() should also take an optional argument for a max number of lines to read. It seems more common/helpful to me than 'hint' for max bytes. In n>1 case one could do...
f.readlines(maxlines=10)
or for the 'peek' case
f.peeklines(10)
I also didn't find any of the answers from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1767513/read-first-n-lines-of-a-file-in-p... to be very compelling.
I am more than willing to propose a patch if the idea(s) are supported.
- John