[Python-ideas] Iterating non-newline-separated files should be easier

[Guido van Rossum]

Well, I had to look up the newline option for open(), even though I
probably invented it. :-)

Would it still apply only to text files?

On Thursday, July 17, 2014, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com.dmarc.invalid>
wrote:

> On Jul 17, 2014, at 20:36, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com <javascript:;>>
> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >> You seem to be talking about the implementation of the change, but what
> >> is the interface? Having made all these changes, how does it effect
> >> Python code? You have a use-case of splitting on something other than
> >> the standard newlines, so how does one do that? E.g. suppose I have a
> >> file "spam.txt" which uses NEL (Next Line, U+0085) as the end of line
> >> character. How would I iterate over lines in this file?
> >
> > The way I understand it is this:
> >
> > for line in open("spam.txt", newline="\u0085"):
> >    process(line)
> >
> > If that's the case, I would be strongly in favour of this. Nice and
> > clean, and should break nothing; there'll be special cases for
> > newline=None and newline='', and the only change is that, instead of a
> > small number of permitted values ('\n', '\r', '\r\n'), any string (or
> > maybe any one-character string plus '\r\n'?) would be permitted.
> >
> > Effectively, it's not "iterate over this file, divided by \0 instead
> > of newlines", but it's "this file uses the unusual encoding of
> > newline=\0, now iterate over lines in the file". Seems a smart way to
> > do it IMO.
>
> Exactly. As soon as Alexander suggested it, I immediately knew it was much
> better than my original idea.
>
> (Apologies for overestimating the obviousness of that.)
>
>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (on iPad)
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