After letting it steep overnight, I came up with this variant which addresses most of the issues that have come up in this thread: try: result = '' w

After letting it steep overnight, I came up with this variant which addresses most of the issues that have come up in this thread: try: result = '' while (b = next(file_bytes_iterator)) != '\0': result += b # maybe parse more of the file here except StopIteration: throw ValueError("Unexpected end of file")