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

[andrew cooke]

have you looked in operators?  that might avoid the need for a class.

Jim Garrison wrote:
> S Arrowsmith wrote:
>> Jim Garrison  <jhg at acm.org> wrote:
>>> 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?
>>
>> class sentinel:
>>     def __eq__(self, other):
>>         return termination_test()
>>
>> for x in iter(callable, sentinel()):
>>     ...
>>
>> Writing a sensible sentinel.__init__ is left as an exercise....
>>
>
> If I understand correctly, this pattern allows me to create
> an object (instance of class sentinel) that implements whatever
> equality semantics I need to effect loop termination.  In the
> case in point, then, I end up with
>
>      class sentinel:
>          def __eq__(self,other):
>              return other=='' or other==b''
>
>      with open(filename, "rb") as f:
>          for buf in iter(lambda: f.read(1000), sentinel())):
>              do_something(buf)
>
> i.e. sentinel is really "object that compares equal to both ''
> and b''".  While I appreciate how this works, I think the
> introduction of a whole new class is a bit of overkill for
> what should be expressible in iter()
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
>