[Tutor] file question

Reggie Dugard reggie@merfinllc.com
Tue Aug 5 09:38:01 EDT 2003


Joshua,

There's no direct way to get to a specific line in a file, but you can
do it without having to read in the entire file.  If you're using Python
2.3 you can do the following:

for line_number, line in enumerate(open('filename')):
    if line_number == desired_line:
        break
else:
    raise ValueError, 'File too short'

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 05:24, jpollack@socrates.Berkeley.EDU wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Is there a way to pull a specific line from a file without reading the
> whole thing into memory with .readlines()?
> 
> I have a monstrous text file, but I can easily figure out the index
> numbers of the particular line I need without having to read the whole
> thing in?  Is there a quick way to do this?
> 
> I couldn't find anything in documentation specifically addressing this.
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> Joshua Pollack
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor@python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
-- 
Reggie






More information about the Tutor mailing list