How to do this in Python? - A "gotcha"

Andrii V. Mishkovskyi mishok13 at gmail.com
Wed Mar 18 12:01:22 EDT 2009


On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jim Garrison <jhg at acm.org> wrote:
> Jim Garrison wrote:
>>
>> Luis Zarrabeitia wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tuesday 17 March 2009 06:04:36 pm Jim Garrison wrote:
>>> with open(filename, "rb") as f:
>>>    for buf in iter(lambda: f.read(1000),''):
>>>        do_something(buf)
>>
>> This is the most pythonic solution yet.
>>
>> Thanks to all the responders who took time to ponder this seemingly
>> trivial question.  I learned a lot about the Python mind-set.
>
> I just tried the code as given above and it results in an infinite loop.
>
> Since f.read() returns a byte string when in binary mode, the sentinel
> has to be b''.  Is there a value that will compare equal to both '' and b''?
>
> It's a shame the iter(o,sentinel) builtin does the
> comparison itself, instead of being defined as iter(callable,callable)
> where the second argument implements the termination test and returns a
> boolean.  This would seem to add much more generality... is
> it worthy of a PEP?

Just before you start writing a PEP, take a look at `takewhile'
function in `itertools' module. ;)

>
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>



-- 
Wbr, Andrii V. Mishkovskyi.

He's got a heart of a little child, and he keeps it in a jar on his desk.



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