Question

How do I check for EOF in Python? I found a bug in my code where the last block of text after the separator isn’t added to the return list. Or maybe there’s a better way of expressing this function?

Here’s my code:

def get_text_blocks(filename):
    text_blocks = []
    text_block = StringIO.StringIO()
    with open(filename, 'r') as f:
        for line in f:
            text_block.write(line)
            print line
            if line.startswith('-- -'):
                text_blocks.append(text_block.getvalue())
                text_block.close()
                text_block = StringIO.StringIO()
    return text_blocks

Answer 1

You might find it easier to solve this using itertools.groupby.

def get_text_blocks(filename):
    import itertools
    with open(filename,'r') as f:
        groups = itertools.groupby(f, lambda line:line.startswith('-- -'))
        return [''.join(lines) for is_separator, lines in groups if not is_separator]

Another alternative is to use a regular expression to match the separators:

def get_text_blocks(filename):
    import re
    seperator = re.compile('^-- -.*', re.M)
    with open(filename,'r') as f:
        return re.split(seperator, f.read())