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

[bieffe62 at gmail.com]

On Mar 18, 6:06 pm, Jim Garrison <j... at acm.org> wrote:
> S Arrowsmith wrote:
> > Jim Garrison  <j... 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()- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -


In the specific case it should not be needed to create a class,
because
at least with python 2.6:

>>> b'' == ''
True
>>> u'' == ''
True
>>>

so you should be able to do:

      with open(filename, "rb") as f:
          for buf in iter(lambda: f.read(1000), "" ):
              do_something(buf)


Ciao
------
FB