Strange loop behavior

[Matt Nordhoff]

Gabriel Rossetti wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I wrote a program that reads data from a file and puts it in a string, 
> the problem is that it loops infinitely and that's not wanted, here is 
> the code :
> 
>     d = repr(f.read(DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE))
>     while d != "":
>         file_str.write(d)
>         d = repr(f.read(DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE))

FWIW, you could do it like this to avoid duplicating that line of code:

    while True:
        d = f.read(DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE)
        if not d:
            break
        file_str.write(d)

Some people would also compress the whitespace a bit:

    while True:
        d = f.read(DEFAULT_BUFFER_SIZE)
        if not d: break
        file_str.write(d)

<snip>

(I'll comment on your Unicode issues in a minute.)
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