Alf P. Steinbach wrote: >So with 'w+' the only way to get garbage is if 'read' reads beyond the end of >file, or 'open' doesn't conform to the documentation.
It does read beyond the end of file. This is perhaps the way the underlying C library works, but it looks like an "unexpected feature" (read: bug) to me. I reproduced (with Python 2.5.2 on WinXP) the code the OP wrote after creating an empty (0-byte) test file; after the write() the read() returns random garbage. I can't imagine why anyone would want that behaviour. The file grew to be 4099 bytes after f.close(). I wrote 'hello' to it, so the length of garbage added was 4094 bytes, which I find a strange number also. I would have expected the read to return nothing. Can anyone explain or even defend this behaviour? Gertjan. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list