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

Thank you! I have recently converted to python 3 and have been frustrated by using readlines(0) to read large files. This solved the problem. But to get each line, I had to do a couple extra steps. Each line was preceded by a "b'" which I guess that it was in binary format. Using "decode(utf-8)" changed it ascii.

Then I had to remove a "=\n" in the middle of each line.

Then I split the lines at the new line.

b_data=(fh.read(ele[1]))#endat This is one chunk of ascii data in binary format
        a_data=((binascii.b2a_qp(b_data)).decode('utf-8')) #Data chunk in 'split' ascii format
        data_chunk = (a_data.replace('=\n','').strip()) #Splitting characters removed
        data_list = data_chunk.split('\n')  #List containing lines in chunk
        #print(data_list,'\n')
        #time.sleep(1)
        for j in range(len(data_list)): #iterate through data_list to get each item 
            i += 1
            line_of_data = data_list[j]
            print(line_of_data)

Here is the code starting just above "print data" in Arohi's code.