[Python-Dev] Decoding incomplete unicode (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Wed Jul 28 03:26:04 CEST 2004

- readline() and readlines() have an additional option for dropping the u"\n".

I'll point out (since no one else has so far) that the reasons for keeping the linefeed at the end of lines returned by readline() and readlines() are documented here: http://docs.python.org/lib/bltin-file-objects.html#foot3271

Specifically it allows one to use the following and have it "do the right thing".

while 1: line = obj.readline() if not line: break process(line)

Having the option of readline() and readlines() being ambiguous anywhere sounds like a misfeature. Furthermore, since all other readline and readlines calls that do not inherit from StreamReader use the unambiguous "always include the line ending", changing StreamReader to be different is obviously the wrong thing to do.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list