Specific question about readlines versus xreadlines

[Garry Knight]

Erik gave you the correct answer. I just thought I'd point out a few other
things about your code:

In message <c3aq2p$6v6$1 at news01.intel.com>, Pernell Williams wrote:

> #opening the file for reading
> 
> str = 'myShortFile'

Did you know that str() is a Python function that returns the string
representation of an object. To see how it works, run Python interactively
and pass it some objects:
        print str(3)
        print str('hello')
        d = {"one": 1, "two": 2, "three": 3}
        print str(d)
In other words, it's not a good idea to redefine str in your code as it
hides the original function making it unusable. Also...

> file = open(str, 'r')

In Python file() is a function that happens to be an alias of open(). So if
you redefine it like this you can't do:
        f = file('myFile', 'r')
This is OK if you only intend to use open() but redefining existing Python
names is still arguably not good practice.

> while 1:
> 
>   line = file.readline()
> 
>   if line == '':
> 
>     break

The usual way to read lines from a file is like this (assuming you followed
my previous suggestion and stopped using 'file' for the filename:
        for line in f.readlines():
          # process line
This will loop until line == '' so you don't even need the break statement.
And you can make it shorter still:
        for line in f:
          # process line
And you can shorten the whole process further still by combining the open
with the read:
        for line in open(filename):
          # process line

I realise that your example is specifically comparing and contrasting the
readline() function with the xreadlines() function, but I wasn't sure if
you were aware of the different ways of doing the same thing. If you were,
please ignore the above paragraph: hopefully it will prove useful to
newcomers to Python.

>   data = line
> 
>   print data

I'm curious as to why you didn't just do 'print line' rather than assigning
it to 'data' first.

-- 
Garry Knight
garryknight at gmx.net  ICQ 126351135
Linux registered user 182025