OK, I am sorry , I did not explain my problem completely. I can easily break from the loop when I see the character in a line that I just read; however my problem involves putting back the line I just read since if I have seen this special character, I have read one line too many. Let me illustrate suppose the file has 3 lines
line1.line1.line1 >line2.line2.line line3.line3.line3 now suppose I have read the first line already. then I read the second line and notice that there is a ">" in front (my special character) then I want the put back the second line into the file or the stdin. An easy way is if i read all the lines in to an array and then I can put back the line with the special character back into this array. However, this file I am readding is huge! and I can read it all in one swoop (not enough memory). for x in stdin: if x[0]==">": #### put back the x some how... <----- break else: print x I hope this is clear thanks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list