Many operating systems have command line tools that allow a user to page through a file in chunks. As a demonstration of how to read text files in Python, I used an example from Programming Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming.

Code

def more(text, numlines=15):
    # This splits the text into a list object based on line
    # endings
    lines = text.splitlines()

    # Now continue to loop until we are out of lines
    while lines:
        # Slice off numLines into chunk
        chunk = lines[:numlines]
        
        # Remove numLines from the beginning of lines
        lines = lines[numlines:]

        # Now loop through each line in chunk
        for line in chunk:
            # and then print a line
            print(line)
            
        # Now ask the user if we want to keep going
        if lines and input('More?') not in ['y', 'Y']:
            break

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Import sys so that we can read command line arguments
    import sys
    
    # Next, we are grabbing the first argument from the
    # command line, and passing it the open function
    # which returns a file object. Calling read on this
    # object will dump the contents of the file into a String
    # which gets passed to our more function above
    more(open(sys.argv[1]).read(), 10)

Detailed Explanation

The comments in the code above are mine and explain what is going on in the program. The program starts by testing if this script is getting called as a standalone program or if we are importing this code as a module.

Assuming this is a standalone program, we import the sys module so that we can examine the command line arguments. The second command line argument needs to be a text file or this program will crash. We pass the name of the file to the open function, which returns a file object. Calling read() on the file object dumps the entire contents of the file into a String.

At this point, we pass the string into our more() function. It starts out by splitting the string by lines, which returns a list object. We start to loop through this list object, which continues until the list is empty.

Inside of the while loop, we slice off numLines from lines and store then in chunk. Then we remove those lines from the lines list. The next step is to print out each line in chunk. Once that is complete, we test if we still have more lines to print and if we do, we ask the user if they want to keep going or exit.

Here is the program output when run on my screen.

Patricks-MacBook-Pro:System stonesoup$ python more.py more.py
def more(text, numlines=15):
    lines = text.splitlines()

    while lines:
        chunk = lines[:numlines]
        lines = lines[numlines:]

        for line in chunk:
            print(line)
        if lines and input('More?') not in ['y', 'Y']:
More?y
            break

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    more(open(sys.argv[1]).read(), 10)