proposal: another file iterator

[Paul Rubin]

I find pretty often that I want to loop through characters in a file:

while True:
c = f.read(1)
if not c: break
...

or sometimes of some other blocksize instead of 1. It would sure
be easier to say something like:

for c in f.iterbytes(): ...

or

for c in f.iterbytes(blo cksize): ...

this isn't anything terribly advanced but just seems like a matter of
having the built-in types keep up with language features. The current
built-in iterator (for line in file: ...) is useful for text files but
can potentially read strings of unbounded size, so it's inadvisable for
arbitrary files.

Does anyone else like this idea?

[Raymond Hettinger]

Re: proposal: another file iterator

Paul Rubin wrote:[color=blue]
> I find pretty often that I want to loop through characters in a file:
>
> while True:
> c = f.read(1)
> if not c: break
> ...
>
> or sometimes of some other blocksize instead of 1. It would sure
> be easier to say something like:
>
> for c in f.iterbytes(): ...
>
> or
>
> for c in f.iterbytes(blo cksize): ...
>
> this isn't anything terribly advanced but just seems like a matter of
> having the built-in types keep up with language features. The current
> built-in iterator (for line in file: ...) is useful for text files but
> can potentially read strings of unbounded size, so it's inadvisable for
> arbitrary files.
>
> Does anyone else like this idea?[/color]

+1 It would be nice to see this replace the old API where you had to
test for an empty return value.


FWIW, I've seen it expressed using other tools:

for c in iter(partial(so mefile.read, blocksize), ''):
. . .

Raymond