Giving a warning (including file name) that the file is empty may be useful; otherwise this will just lead to errors later on with a less comprehensible error message for users who do not expect their file to be empty.

Great idea, what's the canonical way of doing this?

Use a UserWarning. Something like:

import warnings
warnings.warn("File %s is empty" % filename, UserWarning)

See http://docs.python.org/library/warnings.html

I think I've got it, looks OK to me at least. UserWarning is the default, it seems.

That doesn't include the filename yet - that can be very helpful if you're batch processing files.

I hope that should do it!

Not quite, the .format method was only introduced in Python 2.6. You need the old-fashioned %s instead, we need Python 2.4 compatibility.

I keep living in the future, I forgot about python2.4! stefanv - I did as you suggested.

Merged, thanks.