On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 09:10:50AM -0700, Alexandre Ferrieux wrote: > I'm a total newbie in Python, but did give quite a try to the > documentation before coming here. > Sorry if I missed the obvious. > > The Tutorial says about the "for line in f" idiom that it is "space- > efficient". > Short of further explanation, I interpret this as "doesn't read the > whole file before spitting out lines".
Correct. It reads one line at a time (as an "iterator") and returns it. > In other words, I would say "lazy". Which would be a Good Thing, a > much nicer idiom than the usual while loop calling readline()... The space-efficiency is similar. The faux pas would rather to read the whole file with readlines(). > But when I use it on the standard input, be it the tty or a pipe, it > seems to wait for EOF before yielding the first line. Standard input is a weird thing in Python. Try sending two EOFs (Ctrl-D). There is some internal magic with two loops checking for EOF. It's submitted as a bug report bug the developers denied a solution. Otherwise it's fine. In a pipe you shouldn't even notice. Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
