What's the Pythonic way to store a data block in a Python script?

Question

Perl allows me to use the __DATA__ token in a script to mark the start of a data block. I can read the data using the DATA filehandle. What\'s the Pythonic wa

Answer 1

Use the StringIO module to create an in-source file-like object:

from StringIO import StringIO

textdata = """\
Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
"""

# in place of __DATA__ = open('richard3.txt')
__DATA__ = StringIO(textdata)
for d in __DATA__:
    print d

__DATA__.seek(0)
print __DATA__.readline()

Prints:

Now is the winter of our discontent,

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.

Now is the winter of our discontent,

(I just called this __DATA__ to align with your original question. In practice, this would not be good Python naming style - something like datafile would be more appropriate.)