Assignment and comparison in one statement

[William McBrine]

On Sat, 24 May 2008 13:12:13 +0200, Johannes Bauer wrote:

> char *tmp;
> tmp = fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), f);
> while (tmp) {
> 	printf("%s\n", buf);
> 	tmp = fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), f);
> }

I think a more Pythonic way to write this, in general, would be:

while (1) {
    char *tmp = fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), f);
    if (!tmp)
        break;
    printf("%s\n", buf);
}

In actual Python, that's:

while True:
    buf = f.readline()
    if not buf:
        break
    print buf

Yeah, it's longer than the traditional C way, but you don't need to have 
duplicate fgets() (or whatever) lines. On the plus side, you're less 
likely to get '=' and '==' accidentally swapped in Python.

For this specific example, it can be cut down much more:

for buf in f.readlines():
    print buf

(BTW, all of the above result in doublespacing the original file, but 
that's what your C version was doing, so I kept it that way.)

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