Source code: Lib/fileinput.py
This module implements a helper class and functions to quickly write a loop over standard input or a list of files. If you just want to read or write one file see open().
The typical use is:
import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input():
process(line)
This iterates over the lines of all files listed in sys.argv[1:], defaulting to sys.stdin if the list is empty. If a filename is '-', it is also replaced by sys.stdin. To specify an alternative list of filenames, pass it as the first argument to input(). A single file name is also allowed.
All files are opened in text mode by default, but you can override this by specifying the mode parameter in the call to input() or FileInput. If an I/O error occurs during opening or reading a file, OSError is raised.
If sys.stdin is used more than once, the second and further use will return no lines, except perhaps for interactive use, or if it has been explicitly reset (e.g. using sys.stdin.seek(0)).
Empty files are opened and immediately closed; the only time their presence in the list of filenames is noticeable at all is when the last file opened is empty.
Lines are returned with any newlines intact, which means that the last line in a file may not have one.
You can control how files are opened by providing an opening hook via the openhook parameter to fileinput.input() or FileInput(). The hook must be a function that takes two arguments, filename and mode, and returns an accordingly opened file-like object. Two useful hooks are already provided by this module.
The following function is the primary interface of this module:
Create an instance of the FileInput class. The instance will be used as global state for the functions of this module, and is also returned to use during iteration. The parameters to this function will be passed along to the constructor of the FileInput class.
The