zip() alternative for iterating through two iterables

itertools has a function izip that does that

from itertools import izip
for i, j in izip(handle1, handle2):
    ...

If the files are of different sizes you may use izip_longest, as izip will stop at the smaller file.

You can use izip_longest like this to pad the shorter file with empty lines

in python 2.6

from itertools import izip_longest
with handle1 as open('filea', 'r'):
    with handle2 as open('fileb', 'r'): 
        for i, j in izip_longest(handle1, handle2, fillvalue=""):
            ...

or in Python 3+

from itertools import zip_longest
with handle1 as open('filea', 'r'), handle2 as open('fileb', 'r'): 
    for i, j in zip_longest(handle1, handle2, fillvalue=""):
        ...