Hello John, >Silently ignoring errors when reading a file doesn't sound like a good >idea to me at all, especially if different records have different >formats.
Yeah, you're right, but the file itself is quite big and I am interested only in a small part of it. Moreover, the sequence keyword-number-keytype is unlikely to fail to be read unless the simulator that outputs the file does something very strange. > (a) read the docs on the struct module Yes, I have done it, and I have written something similar to what you propose (well, actually your solution is more elegant than mine :-D ) > if keyword == 'DIMENS': > # 'dimens' is neither declared nor initialised in the FORTRAN > # so I'm just guessing here ... Sorry, I forgot to include it, 'dimens' is an integer(4) Thank you very much for your explanation, now it is very clear what I should do. I hope performances will not change so much: fortran is very fast in reading files (but I use it only in this case, I love to use Python)... well, let's see :-D Andrea. -- "Imagination Is The Only Weapon In The War Against Reality." http://xoomer.virgilio.it/infinity77/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
