How to read a single character at a time from a file in Python?

Question

Can anyone tell me how can I do this?

Answer 1

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)