How to read from stdin or from a file if no data is piped in Python?

Question

I have a CLI script and want it to read data from a file. It should be able to read it in two ways :

• cat data.txt | ./my_script.py
• ./my

Answer 1

For unix/linux you can detect whether data is being piped in by looking at os.isatty(0)

$ date | python -c "import os;print os.isatty(0)"
False
$ python -c "import os;print os.isatty(0)"
True

I'm not sure there is an equivalent for Windows.

edit Ok, I tried it with python2.6 on windows XP

C:\Python26>echo "hello" | python.exe -c "import os;print os.isatty(0)"  
False

C:\Python26> python.exe -c "import os;print os.isatty(0)"  
True

So maybe it it not all hopeless for windows