Maximum characters that can be stuffed into raw_input() in Python

Question

For an InterviewStreet challenge, we have to be able to accomodate for a 10,000 character String input from the keyboard, but when I copy/paste a 10k long word into my local testing, it cuts off at a thousand or so.

What's the official limit in Python? And is there a way to change this?

Thanks guys

Here's the challenge by-the-by:

http://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges/solve/view/4e1491425cf10/4edb8abd7cacd

Answer 1

Are you sure of the fact that your 10k long word doesn't contain newlines?

---

raw_input([prompt])

If the prompt argument is present, it is written to standard output without a trailing newline. The function then reads a line from input, converts it to a string (stripping a trailing newline), and returns that. When EOF is read, EOFError is raised.

...

If the readline module was loaded, then raw_input() will use it to provide elaborate line editing and history features.

There is no maximum limit (in python) of the buffer returned by raw_input, and as I tested some big length of input to stdin I could not reproduce your result. I tried to search the web for information regarding this but came up with nothing that would help me answer your question.

my tests

  :/tmp% python -c 'print "A"*1000000' | python -c 'print len (raw_input ())';
  1000000
  :/tmp% python -c 'print "A"*210012300' | python -c 'print len (raw_input ())';
  210012300
  :/tmp% python -c 'print "A"*100+"\n"+"B"*100' | python -c 'print len (raw_input ())'; 
  100