How to do this in Python?

Grant Edwards grante at visi.com
Wed Mar 18 00:06:37 EDT 2009


On 2009-03-18, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:
> On 2009-03-17, Jim Garrison <jgarrison at troux.com> wrote:
>> I'm an experienced C/Java/Perl developer learning Python.
>>
>> What's the canonical Python way of implementing this pseudocode?
>>
>>      String buf
>>      File   f
>>      while ((buf=f.read(10000)).length() > 0)
>>      {
>>          do something....
>>      }
>>
>> In other words, I want to read a potentially large file in 10000 byte
>> chunks (or some other suitably large chunk size).  Since the Python 
>> 'file' object implements __next__() only in terms of lines (even,
>> it seems, for files opened in binary mode) I can't see how to use
>> the Python for statement in this context.
>>
>> Am I missing something basic, or is this the canonical way:
>>
>>      with open(filename,"rb") as f:
>>          buf = f.read(10000)
>>          while len(buf) > 0
>>              # do something....
>>              buf = f.read(10000)
>
> with open(filename,"rb") as f:
>   buf = f.read(10000)
>   if not f: break
>   # do something

Ow!  Botched that in a couple ways....

  with open(filename,"rb") as f:
    while True:
      buf = f.read(10000)
      if not buf: break
      # do something

-- 
Grant




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