stdin or optional fileinput

[Steven Bethard]

the.theorist wrote:
> I was writing a small script the other day with the following CLI
> prog [options] [file]*
> 
> I've used getopt to parse out the possible options, so we'll ignore
> that part, and assume for the rest of the discussion that args is a
> list of file names (if any provided).
> 
> I used this bit of code to detect wether i want stdinput or not.
> 
> if len(args)==0:
>     args = [ sys.stdin ]
> 
> Now in my main loop I've written:
> 
> for file in args:
>     for line in open( file ):
>         #do stuff

You should probably write:

if not args:  # note that len(args) == 0 is repetitively redundant, over
               # and over again, in a reiterative manner
     files = [sys.stdin]
else:
     files = (open(filename) for filename in args)

...

for fileobj in files:  # using the name 'file' is a bad idea since it
                        # shadows the builtin 'file'
     for line in fileobj:
         # do stuff


STeVe