get_readable_fileobj

astropy.utils.data.get_readable_fileobj(*args, **kwds)

Given a filename or a readable file-like object, return a context manager that yields a readable file-like object.

This supports passing filenames, URLs, and readable file-like objects, any of which can be compressed in gzip or bzip2.

Parameters:

name_or_obj : str or file-like object

The filename of the file to access (if given as a string), or the file-like object to access.

If a file-like object, it must be opened in binary mode.

encoding : str, optional

When None (default), returns a file-like object with a read method that on Python 2.x returns bytes objects and on Python 3.x returns str (unicode) objects, using locale.getpreferredencoding as an encoding. This matches the default behavior of the built-in open when no mode argument is provided.

When 'binary', returns a file-like object where its read method returns bytes objects.

When another string, it is the name of an encoding, and the file-like object’s read method will return str (unicode) objects, decoded from binary using the given encoding.

cache : bool, optional

Whether to cache the contents of remote URLs.

show_progress : bool, optional

Whether to display a progress bar if the file is downloaded from a remote server. Default is True.

remote_timeout : float

Timeout for remote requests in seconds (default is the configurable REMOTE_TIMEOUT, which is 3s by default)

Returns:

file : readable file-like object

Notes

This function is a context manager, and should be used for example as:

with get_readable_fileobj('file.dat') as f:
    contents = f.read()