tail

[Marco Sulla]

On Mon, 9 May 2022 at 07:56, Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au> wrote:
>
> The point here is that text is a very different thing. Because you
> cannot seek to an absolute number of characters in an encoding with
> variable sized characters. _If_ you did a seek to an arbitrary number
> you can end up in the middle of some character. And there are encodings
> where you cannot inspect the data to find a character boundary in the
> byte stream.

Ooook, now I understand what you and Barry mean. I suppose there's no
reliable way to tail a big file opened in text mode with a decent performance.

Anyway, the previous-previous function I posted worked only for files
opened in binary mode, and I suppose it's reliable, since it searches
only for b"\n", as readline() in binary mode do.