On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 6:13 PM, Victor Hooi <victorh...@gmail.com> wrote: > My first thought was to use a try-catch block and attempt to open it using > the most common filetype, then if that failed, try the next most common type > etc. before finally erroring out. > > So basically, using exception handling for flow-control. > > However, is that considered bad practice, or un-Pythonic?
It's fairly common to work that way. But you may want to be careful what order you try them in; some codecs might be technically capable of reading other formats than you wanted, so start with the most specific. Alternatively, looking at a file's magic number (either with python-magic/libmagic or by manually reading in a few bytes) might be more efficient. Either way can work, take your choice! ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
