[Tutor] little something in the way of file parsing

[Tom Jenkins]

On Fri, 2002-07-19 at 16:36, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> 
> On 19-Jul-2002 Erik Price wrote:
> > On Friday, July 19, 2002, at 02:49  PM, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> > 
[snip]
> >> # note I use the readline() idiom because there is currently 10 
> >> thousand plus
> >> # entries in the file which equates to some 90,000 lines.
> >>
> >> while 1:
> >>     line = fd.readline()
> > 
> > I assume that this comment means that you use readline() as opposed to 
> > readlines() ?  In other words, what are you actually saying in this 
> > comment (or rather why did you feel the need to clarify why you chose 
> > readline() ).
> > 
> 
> I added this comment for the tutor list.  In many intro examples you see:
> 
> for line in file.readlines()
>   handle(line)
> 
> which is great for quicky code.  However readlines() returns a list of strings.
> In my case it returns a 100 thousand element list of strings -- memory wasted.
> 

To further along Danny's idea of digging into the code...
I have a question as to why xreadlines wouldn't work here?  It seems
that this is exactly what xreadlines is for; iterating over a large file
without loading it all into memory at once.  Ah, wait xreadlines is only
available for 2.1+, was that it?

-- 

Tom Jenkins
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