How to read a large file - line by line?

Question

I want to iterate over each line of an entire file. One way to do this is by reading the entire file, saving it to a list, then going over the line of interest. This method

Answer 1

Need to frequently read a large file from last position reading ?

I have created a script used to cut an Apache access.log file several times a day. So I needed to set a position cursor on last line parsed during last execution. To this end, I used file.seek() and file.seek() methods which allows the storage of the cursor in file.

My code :

ENCODING = "utf8"
CURRENT_FILE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))

# This file is used to store the last cursor position
cursor_position = os.path.join(CURRENT_FILE_DIR, "access_cursor_position.log")

# Log file with new lines
log_file_to_cut = os.path.join(CURRENT_FILE_DIR, "access.log")
cut_file = os.path.join(CURRENT_FILE_DIR, "cut_access", "cut.log")

# Set in from_line 
from_position = 0
try:
    with open(cursor_position, "r", encoding=ENCODING) as f:
        from_position = int(f.read())
except Exception as e:
    pass

# We read log_file_to_cut to put new lines in cut_file
with open(log_file_to_cut, "r", encoding=ENCODING) as f:
    with open(cut_file, "w", encoding=ENCODING) as fw:
        # We set cursor to the last position used (during last run of script)
        f.seek(from_position)
        for line in f:
            fw.write("%s" % (line))

    # We save the last position of cursor for next usage
    with open(cursor_position, "w", encoding=ENCODING) as fw:
        fw.write(str(f.tell()))