end of file for large files

[Bob Horvath]

doyen at mediaone.net wrote:

> I'm very new at this, but after doing a
>
> try:
>     foile = open( filename, 'r')
> except:
>     print  'error '
>     return
>
> lines = file.readlines()
> for line in lines:
>     blah
>
>  I changed to this which I believe reads in a single line at a time
>
> for line n fileinput.input(filename)
>     lctr = lctr + 1
>     processlines(line)
>
> I seems to work well for megabyte files, but I'm not sure what you mean
> by 'large'
> Also I'm not sure it would work for binary files.
>
> You should probably follow the advice of somebody who knows more about
> what they're talking about though :-)
>

I am trying to help someone else out, so I don't have complete details,
but the description of the file was a file that was essentially one very
long (many MB) line that also included some unprintable characters.  That
makes me think anything that relies on readline will potentially fail.