Question

I am writing my own program using peek and this is what I have:

with open('temp.txt', 'r') as inpf2:
    while True:
            c = [inpf2.read(1)]
            if not c:
                break
            k = c.peek(2)
            for d in k:
                if(d == ""):
                    break
                else:
                    c = c.append(d)
            print c  

In this program, i am using peek to see ahead 2 characters in a text file which has text like abcdefg and trying to print out strings of 3 characters like abc, bcd, cde, def, efg.

But when I execute this program, i am getting the error,

k = c.peek(2)  
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'peek'.  

Where am I doing a mistake?

Answer 1

I’m not aware of any Python object having a peek method (apart from io.BufferedStream, that’s the only method returned from a search in the docs).

I’m afraid you’d have to define a peek function yourself. You can find a recipe online that could get you started.

For your particular problem, maybe you could consider using collections.deque