how to read the last line of a huge file???

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/5/2011 1:21 PM, tkpmep at hotmail.com wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer. Yes, it is a text file, but the mystery runs
> deeper: I later found that it works perfectly as written when I run it
> from IDLE or the Python shell, but it fails reliably when I run it
> from PyScripter 2.4.1 (an open source Python IDE)! So I suspect
> there's a PyScripter issue lurking in here. I'm next going to try the
> solution you propose - use only for legal offsets - and then retry it
> under both IDLE and PyScripter. Question: how do I use f.tell() to
> identify if an offset is legal or illegal?

I do not believe you can. You have to be at a position and f.tell() will 
report it.

Note: if a file is utf-8 encoded, and you seek to an arbitrary position 
in binary mode, it is easy to synchronize by discarding the remainder 
(if any)of a multibyte char and finding the start of the next char.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy