[Patches] fileinput.py argument handling (and suggestion)

[Greg Ward]

On 08 April 2000, Greg Stein said:
> I might go one further, and ask for a way to *strip* the line, rather than
> just take the newline off the end. I can't think of a clean way to do so.
> For example:
> 
>   fileinput.input()
>   fileinput.input(strip=fileinput.STRIP_NL)
>   fileinput.input(strip=fileinput.STRIP_ALL)
> 
> It just seems a bit wordy, especially compared to the "chop=1" thing.

See the distutils.text_file module for a rather overblown approach to
this problem: it takes care of stripping newlines, deleting blank lines,
stripping comments, trimming whitespace (leading, trailing, or both),
collapsing lines joined with trailing backslashes, and maybe a few other
things.  All features are optional.  The code is a bit hairy, and I make
no guarantees about performance (except that it probably sucks).  But it
works, and I never have to write all that damn logic again.

I'd vote for keeping fileinput.py relatively simple (adding chop sounds
like a good idea, but anything else is overkill), and putting the
complicated logic in a higher-level module like my text_file.py.  Or
maybe in a higher-level class also provided by fileinput.py.  Whatever.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gward@mems-exchange.org
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