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I have a lot of Perl scripts that looks something like the following. What it does is that it will automatically open any file given as a command line argument and in this case print the content of that file. If no file is given it will instead read from standard input.

while ( <> ) {
    print $_;
}

Is there a way to do something similar in Python without having to explicitly open each file?

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10

The fileinput module in Python's standard library is designed exactly for this purpose, and I quote a bit of code from the URL I just gave:

import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input():
    process(line)

Use print in lieu of process and you have the exact equivalent of your Perl code.

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3 Comments

The library reference manual has been my bloody bedside reading for a couple of weeks now. It's like so unfair that you have years more Python experience. o.O (but I appreciate the answers, nevertheless)
@msw It doesn't actually take years. If you just skim over it enough times you get a feel for what stuff is in there for you already, and what isn't-- even if you haven't actually used the relevant modules. There are always surprises, of course (robotparser? Yikes!). I expect it takes years to have done this accidentally, if anything. ;)
@msw, I agree with David -- I discovered Python in Dec '99, and less than a year later Steve Holden had already nicknamed me "the martellibot" for my copious answers on comp.lang.python;-).
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You could look into sys.argv. It may help.

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