while c = f.read(1)

[Greg McIntyre]

I have a Python snippet:

  f = open("blah.txt", "r")
  while True:
      c = f.read(1)
      if c == '': break # EOF
      # ... work on c

Is some way to make this code more compact and simple? It's a bit
spaghetti.

This is what I would ideally like:

  f = open("blah.txt", "r")
  while c = f.read(1):
      # ... work on c

But I get a syntax error.

    while c = f.read(1):
           ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

And read() doesn't work that way anyway because it returns '' on EOF
and '' != False. If I try:

  f = open("blah.txt", "r")
  while (c = f.read(1)) != '':
      # ... work on c

I get a syntax error also. :(

Is this related to Python's expression vs. statement syntactic
separation? How can I be write this code more nicely?

Thanks