On Sun, 3 Jul 2005 23:52:12 +0200, martian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Hi, > >I've a couple of questions regarding the processing of a big text file >(16MB). > >1) how does python handle: > >> for line in big_file: > >is big_file all read into memory or one line is read at a time or a buffer >is used or ...?
It uses an internal buffer to reach a happy medium between performance and memory usage. > >2) is it possible to advance lines within the loop? The following doesn't >work: > >> for line in big_file: > line_after = big_file.readline() > Yes, but you need to do it like this: fileIter = iter(big_file) for line in fileIter: line_after = fileIter.next() Don't mix iterating with any other file methods, since it will confuse the buffering scheme. Jp -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list