How to find out whether a file is at its `eof`?

fp.read() reads up to the end of the file, so after it's successfully finished you know the file is at EOF; there's no need to check. If it cannot reach EOF it will raise an exception.

When reading a file in chunks rather than with read(), you know you've hit EOF when read returns less than the number of bytes you requested. In that case, the following read call will return the empty string (not None). The following loop reads a file in chunks; it will call read at most once too many.

assert n > 0while True:    chunk = fp.read(n)    if chunk == '':        break    process(chunk)

Or, shorter:

for chunk in iter(lambda: fp.read(n), ''):    process(chunk)

The "for-else" design is often overlooked. See: Python Docs "Control Flow in Loop":

Example

with open('foobar.file', 'rb') as f:    for line in f:        foo()    else:        # No more lines to be read from file        bar()

I'd argue that reading from the file is the most reliable way to establish whether it contains more data. It could be a pipe, or another process might be appending data to the file etc.

If you know that's not an issue, you could use something like:

f.tell() == os.fstat(f.fileno()).st_size