How to ignore the first line of the text read from a file

[Terry Reedy]

Santiago Romero wrote:
>> I want to read text line-by-line from a text file, but want to ignore
>> only the first line. I know how to do it in Java (Java has been my
>> primary language for the last couple of years) and following is what I
>> have in Python, but I don't like it and want to learn the better way
>> of doing it.
> 
>  Why don't you read and discard the first line before processing the
> rest of the file?
> 
>  file = open(filename, 'r')
>  file.readline()
>  for line in file: print line,

I believe that file.readline() will work better than file.next() for 
most purposes since the latter will raise StopIteration on an empty file 
whereas file.readline() merely returns ''.