A question about yield

[chad]

On Nov 7, 9:47 am, Chris Rebert <c... at rebertia.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 9:34 AM, chad <cdal... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>
>
> > #!/usr/local/bin/python
>
> > import sys
>
> > def construct_set(data):
> >    for line in data:
> >        lines = line.splitlines()
> >        for curline in lines:
> >            if curline.strip():
> >                key = curline.split(' ')
> >                value = int(key[0])
> >                yield value
>
> > def approximate(first, second):
> >    midpoint = (first + second) / 2
> >    return midpoint
>
> > def format(input):
> >    prev = 0
> >    value = int(input)
>
> >    with open("/home/cdalten/oakland/freq") as f:
> >        for next in construct_set(f):
> >            if value > prev:
> >                current = prev
> >                prev = next
>
> >        middle = approximate(current, prev)
> >        if middle < prev and value > middle:
> >            return prev
> >        elif value > current and current < middle:
> >            return current
> <snip>
> > The question is about the construct_set() function.
> <snip>
> > I have it yield on 'value' instead of 'curline'. Will the program
> > still read the input file named freq line by line even though I don't
> > have it yielding on 'curline'? Or since I have it yield on 'value',
> > will it read the entire input file into memory at once?
>
> The former. The yield has no effect at all on how the file is read.
> The "for line in data:" iteration over the file object is what makes
> Python read from the file line-by-line. Incidentally, the use of
> splitlines() is pointless; you're already getting single lines from
> the file object by iterating over it, so splitlines() will always
> return a single-element list.
>

But what happens if the input file is say 250MB? Will all 250MB be
loaded into memory at once? Just curious, because I thought maybe
using something like 'yield curline' would prevent this scenario.