Home Original page

[Python-ideas] Iterating non-newline-separated files should be easier

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Jul 19 10:18:35 CEST 2014 
On 19 July 2014 03:32, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I still favour my proposal there to add a separate "readrecords()"
>> method, rather than reusing the line based iteration methods - lines
>> and arbitrary records *aren't* the same thing
>
> But they might well be the same thing. Look at all the Unix commands
> that usually separate output with \n, but can be told to separate with
> \0 instead. If you're reading from something like that, it should be
> just as easy to split on \n as on \0.

Python isn't Unix, and Python has never supported \0 as a "line
ending". Changing the meaning of existing constructs is fraught with
complexity, and should only be done when there is absolutely no
alternative. In this case, there's an alternative: a new method,
specifically for reading arbitrary records.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
More information about the Python-ideas mailing list