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

Just:

myfile = open(filename)
onecaracter = myfile.read(1)

Answer 2

first open a file:

with open("filename") as fileobj:
    for line in fileobj:  
       for ch in line: 
           print ch

Answer 3

This will also work:

with open("filename") as fileObj:
    for line in fileObj:  
        for ch in line:
            print(ch)

It goes through every line in the the file and every character in every line.

Answer 4

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) 

Answer 5

To make a supplement, if you are reading file that contains a line that is vvvvery huge, which might break your memory, you might consider read them into a buffer then yield the each char

def read_char(inputfile, buffersize=10240):
    with open(inputfile, 'r') as f:
        while True:
            buf = f.read(buffersize)
            if not buf:
                break
            for char in buf:
                yield char
        yield '' #handle the scene that the file is empty

if __name__ == "__main__":
    for word in read_char('./very_large_file.txt'):
        process(char)

Answer 6

with open(filename) as f:
  while True:
    c = f.read(1)
    if not c:
      print "End of file"
      break
    print "Read a character:", c