Strange behavior with iterables - is this a bug?

[akameswaran at gmail.com]

Gary Herron wrote:
> List comprehension is a great shortcut, but when the shortcut starts
> causing trouble, better to go with the old ways. You need to reopen each
> file each time you want to iterate through it. You should be able to
> understand the difference between these two bits of code.
>
> The first bit opens each file but uses (two of them) multiple times.
> Reading from a file at EOF returns an empty sequence.
>
> The second bit opened the file each time you want to reuse it. That
> works correctly.
>
> And that suggest the third bit of correctly working code which uses list
> comprehension.
>
> # Fails because files are opened once but reused
> f1 = open('word1.txt')
> f2 = open('word2.txt')
> f3 = open('word3.txt')
> for i1 in f1:
>   for i2 in f2:
>     for i3 in f3:
>       print (i1.strip(),i2.strip(),i3.strip())
>
> and
>
> # Works because files are reopened for each reuse:
> f1 = open('word1.txt')
> for i1 in f1:
> f2 = open('word2.txt')
> for i2 in f2:
> f3 = open('word3.txt')
> for i3 in f3:
> print (i1.strip(),i2.strip(),i3.strip())
>
> and
>
> # Also works because files are reopened for each use:
> print [(i1.strip(),i2.strip(),i3.strip())
>           for i1 in open('word1.txt')
>             for i2 in open('word2.txt')
>               for i3 in open('word3.txt')]
>
> Hope that's clear!
>
> Gary Herron


My original problem was with recursion.  I explicitly nested it out to
try and understand the behavior - and foolishly looked in the wrong
spot for the problem, namely that file is not reitreable.  In truth I
was never concerned about file objects, the problem was failing with my
own custom iterators (wich also were not reiterable) and I switched to
file, to eliminate possible code deficiencies on my own part.  I was
simply chasing down the wrong problem.   As was pointed out to me in a
nother thread - the cleanest implementation which would allow me to use
one copy of the file (in my example the files are identical) would be
to use a trivial iterator class that opens the file, uses tell to track
position and seek to set position, and returns the appropriate line for
that instance - thus eliminating unnecessary file opens and closes.