[Edu-sig] Teaching about files

[Danny Yoo]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Kent Johnson wrote:

> So my question is, am I missing something here? Is f.read(n) important?

Hi Kent,

The most common use for f.read(n) in my personal experience has been in
conjunction with the 'md5' module on really large files.  I have sometimes
done read(1), for character-by-character stuff.  But otherwise, I tend to
use files as iterators.

I try to deemphasize read() and readlines(), as sucking a whole file as a
list isn't a technique that will scale well with large inputs.

Good luck!