You should try f.read(1), which is definitely correct and the right thing to do.
#reading out the file at once in a list and then printing one-by-one
f=open('file.txt')
for i in list(f.read()):
print(i)
This will also work:
with open("filename") as fileObj:
for line in fileObj:
for ch in line:
print(ch)
It goes through every line in the the file and every character in every line.
(Note that this post now looks extremely similar to a highly upvoted answer, but this was not the case at the time of writing.)
To make a supplement, if you are reading file that contains a line that is vvvvery huge, which might break your memory, you might consider read them into a buffer then yield the each char
def read_char(inputfile, buffersize=10240):
with open(inputfile, 'r') as f:
while True:
buf = f.read(buffersize)
if not buf:
break
for char in buf:
yield char
yield '' #handle the scene that the file is empty
if __name__ == "__main__":
for word in read_char('./very_large_file.txt'):
process(char)
Python itself can help you with this, in interactive mode:
>>> help(file.read)
Help on method_descriptor:
read(...)
read([size]) -> read at most size bytes, returned as a string.
If the size argument is negative or omitted, read until EOF is reached.
Notice that when in non-blocking mode, less data than what was requested
may be returned, even if no size parameter was given.
os.system("stty -icanon -echo")
while True:
raw_c = sys.stdin.buffer.peek()
c = sys.stdin.read(1)
print(f"Char: {c}")
I learned a new idiom for this today while watching Raymond Hettinger's Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python:
import functools
with open(filename) as f:
f_read_ch = functools.partial(f.read, 1)
for ch in iter(f_read_ch, ''):
print 'Read a character:', repr(ch)
Just:
myfile = open(filename)
onecaracter = myfile.read(1)
Just read a single character
f.read(1)
I like the accepted answer: it is straightforward and will get the job done. I would also like to offer an alternative implementation:
def chunks(filename, buffer_size=4096):
"""Reads `filename` in chunks of `buffer_size` bytes and yields each chunk
until no more characters can be read; the last chunk will most likely have
less than `buffer_size` bytes.
:param str filename: Path to the file
:param int buffer_size: Buffer size, in bytes (default is 4096)
:return: Yields chunks of `buffer_size` size until exhausting the file
:rtype: str
"""
with open(filename, "rb") as fp:
chunk = fp.read(buffer_size)
while chunk:
yield chunk
chunk = fp.read(buffer_size)
def chars(filename, buffersize=4096):
"""Yields the contents of file `filename` character-by-character. Warning:
will only work for encodings where one character is encoded as one byte.
:param str filename: Path to the file
:param int buffer_size: Buffer size for the underlying chunks,
in bytes (default is 4096)
:return: Yields the contents of `filename` character-by-character.
:rtype: char
"""
for chunk in chunks(filename, buffersize):
for char in chunk:
yield char
def main(buffersize, filenames):
"""Reads several files character by character and redirects their contents
to `/dev/null`.
"""
for filename in filenames:
with open("/dev/null", "wb") as fp:
for char in chars(filename, buffersize):
fp.write(char)
if __name__ == "__main__":
# Try reading several files varying the buffer size
import sys
buffersize = int(sys.argv[1])
filenames = sys.argv[2:]
sys.exit(main(buffersize, filenames))
The code I suggest is essentially the same idea as your accepted answer: read a given number of bytes from the file. The difference is that it first reads a good chunk of data (4006 is a good default for X86, but you may want to try 1024, or 8192; any multiple of your page size), and then it yields the characters in that chunk one by one.
The code I present may be faster for larger files. Take, for example, the entire text of War and Peace, by Tolstoy. These are my timing results (Mac Book Pro using OS X 10.7.4; so.py is the name I gave to the code I pasted):
$ time python so.py 1 2600.txt.utf-8
python so.py 1 2600.txt.utf-8 3.79s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 3.808 total
$ time python so.py 4096 2600.txt.utf-8
python so.py 4096 2600.txt.utf-8 1.31s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 1.318 total
Now: do not take the buffer size at 4096 as a universal truth; look at the results I get for different sizes (buffer size (bytes) vs wall time (sec)):
2 2.726
4 1.948
8 1.693
16 1.534
32 1.525
64 1.398
128 1.432
256 1.377
512 1.347
1024 1.442
2048 1.316
4096 1.318
As you can see, you can start seeing gains earlier on (and my timings are likely very inaccurate); the buffer size is a trade-off between performance and memory. The default of 4096 is just a reasonable choice but, as always, measure first.
f = open('hi.txt', 'w')
f.write('0123456789abcdef')
f.close()
f = open('hej.txt', 'r')
f.seek(12)
print f.read(1) # This will read just "c"
First, open a file:
with open("filename") as fileobj:
for line in fileobj:
for ch in line:
print(ch)
This goes through every line in the file and then every character in that line.
Source: Stackoverflow.com