What is the perfect counterpart in Python for "while not EOF"

python file iteration eof
Allen Koo picture Allen Koo · Mar 24, 2013 · Viewed 319.6k times · Source

To read some text file, in C or Pascal, I always use the following snippets to read the data until EOF:

while not eof do begin
  readline(a);
  do_something;
end;

Thus, I wonder how can I do this simple and fast in Python?

Answer

Martijn Pieters picture Martijn Pieters · Mar 24, 2013

Loop over the file to read lines:

with open('somefile') as openfileobject:
    for line in openfileobject:
        do_something()

File objects are iterable and yield lines until EOF. Using the file object as an iterable uses a buffer to ensure performant reads.

You can do the same with the stdin (no need to use raw_input():

import sys

for line in sys.stdin:
    do_something()

To complete the picture, binary reads can be done with:

from functools import partial

with open('somefile', 'rb') as openfileobject:
    for chunk in iter(partial(openfileobject.read, 1024), b''):
        do_something()

where chunk will contain up to 1024 bytes at a time from the file, and iteration stops when openfileobject.read(1024) starts returning empty byte strings.

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