How do you read from stdin?

Question

I\'m trying to do some of the code golf challenges, but they all require the input to be taken from stdin. How do I get that in Python?

Answer 1

Read from sys.stdin, but to read binary data on Windows, you need to be extra careful, because sys.stdin there is opened in text mode and it will corrupt \r\n replacing them with \n.

The solution is to set mode to binary if Windows + Python 2 is detected, and on Python 3 use sys.stdin.buffer.

import sys

PY3K = sys.version_info >= (3, 0)

if PY3K:
    source = sys.stdin.buffer
else:
    # Python 2 on Windows opens sys.stdin in text mode, and
    # binary data that read from it becomes corrupted on \r\n
    if sys.platform == "win32":
        # set sys.stdin to binary mode
        import os, msvcrt
        msvcrt.setmode(sys.stdin.fileno(), os.O_BINARY)
    source = sys.stdin

b = source.read()