How can I read large text files in Python, line by line, without loading it into memory?

Question

I need to read a large file, line by line. Lets say that file has more than 5GB and I need to read each line, but obviously I do not want to use readlines() bec

Answer 1

You are better off using an iterator instead. Relevant: http://docs.python.org/library/fileinput.html

From the docs:

import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input("filename"):
    process(line)

This will avoid copying the whole file into memory at once.