Canonical way of dealing with null-separated lines?

[Christopher De Vries]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 10:54:50PM -0500, Douglas Alan wrote:
> Is there a canonical way of iterating over the lines of a file that
> are null-separated rather than newline-separated?

I'm not sure if there is a canonical method, but I would recommending using a
generator to get something like this, where 'f' is a file object:

def readnullsep(f):
    # Need a place to put potential pieces of a null separated string
    # across buffer boundaries
    retain = []

    while True:
        instr = f.read(2048)
        if len(instr)==0:
            # End of file
            break

        # Split over nulls
        splitstr = instr.split('\0')

        # Combine with anything left over from previous read
        retain.append(splitstr[0])
        splitstr[0] = ''.join(retain)

        # Keep last piece for next loop and yield the rest
        retain = [splitstr[-1]]
        for element in splitstr[:-1]:
            yield element

    # yield anything left over
    yield retain[0]



Chris