Well, yeah, and things could even be more tricky if the read in characters are in some strange encoding, and an obscure language. ;-)

I read the article from the OP as if (s)he had problems with the fact that the source (s)he's reading from continues to produce data - not that (s)he needed help with non line oriented input. But even if you want to read byte by byte, just do a S/ = \1 before reading.

Abigail