Question

Are there any alternatives to the code below:

startFromLine = 141978 # or whatever line I need to jump to  urlsfile = open(filename, 'rb', 0)  linesCounter = 1  for line in urlsfile:     if linesCounter > startFromLine:         DoSomethingWithThisLine(line)      linesCounter += 1 

If I’m processing a huge text file (~15MB) with lines of unknown but different length, and need to jump to a particular line which number I know in advance? I feel bad by processing them one by one when I know I could ignore at least first half of the file. Looking for more elegant solution if there is any.

Answer 1

linecache:

The linecache module allows one to get any line from a Python source file, while attempting to optimize internally, using a cache, the common case where many lines are read from a single file. This is used by the traceback module to retrieve source lines for inclusion in the formatted traceback…