Question

I am looking for a method in Python which can read multiple lines from a file(10 lines at a time). I have already looked into readlines(sizehint), I tried to pass value 10 but doesn’t read only 10 lines. It actually reads till end of the file(I have tried on the small file). Each line is 11 bytes long and each read should fetch me 10 lines each time. If less than 10 lines are found then return only those lines. My actual file contains more than 150K lines.

Any idea how I can achieve this?

Answer 1

You’re looking for itertools.islice():

with open('data.txt') as f:
    lines = []
    while True:
        line = list(islice(f, 10)) #islice returns an iterator ,so you convert it to list here.
        if line:                     
            #do something with current set of <=10 lines here
            lines.append(line)       # may be store it 
        else:
            break
    print lines