Possible File iteration bug

[Billy Mays]

On 07/15/2011 04:01 AM, bruno.desthuilliers at gmail.com wrote:
> On Jul 14, 9:46 pm, Billy Mays<no... at nohow.com>  wrote:
>> I noticed that if a file is being continuously written to, the file
>> generator does not notice it:
>>
>> def getLines(f):
>>       lines = []
>>       for line in f:
>>           lines.append(line)
>>       return lines
>
> what's wrong with file.readlines() ?

Using that will read the entire file into memory which may not be 
possible.  In the library reference, it mentions that using the 
generator (which calls file.next()) uses a read ahead buffer to 
efficiently loop over the file.  If I call .readline() myself, I forfeit 
that performance gain.

I was thinking that a convenient solution to this problem would be to 
introduce a new Exception call PauseIteration, which would signal to the 
caller that there is no more data for now, but not to close down the 
generator entirely.

--
Bill