[Python-ideas] "While" suggestion

[Josiah Carlson]

There doesn't really exist an "end of file" unless you are using a
stream (pipe, socket, ...).  Real files can be appended to at any time
on the three major platforms.

Also, if you know that you are going to be reading blocked data,
perhaps it's better just to write your blocked reader (with your
single non-pythonic idiom) once.

def blocked_reader(handle, blocksize=4096):
    data = handle.read(blocksize)
    while data:
        yield data
        data = handle.read(blocksize)

Then you can use a better common idiom than a while loop:

for block in blocked_reader(handle):
    handle_data(block)

 - Josiah

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Stavros Korokithakis
<stavros at korokithakis.net> wrote:
> I don't think they do, if I'm not mistaken the only way is to call read()
> and see if it returns the empty string. I agree that this would be better,
> but the use case I mentioned is not the only one this would be useful in...
> Unfortunately I can't think of any right now, but there have been a few
> times when I had to initialise things outside the loop and it always strikes
> me as ugly.
>
> Thomas Lee wrote:
>>
>> It's not currently possible to determine if a file/stream is at its end,
>> is it?
>>
>> If that were the case you could easily do the read before your
>> do_something call. Something like:
>>
>> while not my_file.eof:
>>  data = my_file.read(1024)
>>  do_something(data)
>>
>> Can anyone explain why file objects don't support some sort of eof check?
>> Something gives me the impression that it was an intentional decision.
>>
>> IMO something like this would be better than more syntax.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> T
>>
>> Stavros Korokithakis wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello all,
>>> I have noticed that sometimes "while" loops produce "unpythonic"
>>> patterns, such as the following:
>>>
>>> data = my_file.read(1024)
>>> while data:
>>>    do_something(data)
>>>    data = my_file.read(1024)
>>>
>>> The assignment is repeated, which is less than optimal. Since we don't
>>> have a while statement that does the check in the end, would it not be
>>> better if the syntax of while could be amended to  include something like
>>> this (in the spirit of the new "with" keyword)?:
>>>
>>> while my_file.read(1024) as data:
>>>   do_something(data)
>>>
>>> This would terminate the loop when myfile.read() evaluated to False, and
>>> it is more pythonic than repeating onesself.
>>>
>>> I contacted GvR about this, and he replied that this syntax would have to
>>> be part of the expression than part of the while, which I agree would be
>>> less than ideal. However, I don't see why it would have to be part of the
>>> expression, since the "while" could easily assign the value of the
>>> expression to the variable and break if it evaluates to False.
>>>
>>> I would appreciate any thoughts on this,
>>> Stavros Korokithakis
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
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>>> Python-ideas at python.org
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>>>
>>
>
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