proposal: another file iterator

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Sun Jan 15 21:24:59 EST 2006


Paul Rubin wrote:
> I find pretty often that I want to loop through characters in a file:
>
>   while True:
>      c = f.read(1)
>      if not c: break
>      ...
>
> or sometimes of some other blocksize instead of 1.  It would sure
> be easier to say something like:
>
>    for c in f.iterbytes(): ...
>
> or
>
>    for c in f.iterbytes(blocksize): ...
>
> this isn't anything terribly advanced but just seems like a matter of
> having the built-in types keep up with language features.  The current
> built-in iterator (for line in file: ...) is useful for text files but
> can potentially read strings of unbounded size, so it's inadvisable for
> arbitrary files.
>
> Does anyone else like this idea?

+1   It would be nice to see this replace the old API where you had to
test for an empty return value.


FWIW, I've seen it expressed using other tools:

   for c in iter(partial(somefile.read, blocksize), ''):
         . . .

Raymond




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