Reading specific lines only

Question

I\'m using a for loop to read a file, but I only want to read specific lines, say line #26 and #30. Is there any built-in feature to achieve this?

Thanks

Answer 1

A better and minor change for Alok Singhal's answer

fp = open("file")
for i, line in enumerate(fp,1):
    if i == 26:
        # 26th line
    elif i == 30:
        # 30th line
    elif i > 30:
        break
fp.close()

Answer 2

If you want to read specific lines, such as line starting after some threshold line then you can use the following codes, file = open("files.txt","r") lines = file.readlines() ## convert to list of lines datas = lines[11:] ## raed the specific lines

Answer 3

def getitems(iterable, items):
  items = list(items) # get a list from any iterable and make our own copy
                      # since we modify it
  if items:
    items.sort()
    for n, v in enumerate(iterable):
      if n == items[0]:
        yield v
        items.pop(0)
        if not items:
          break

print list(getitems(open("/usr/share/dict/words"), [25, 29]))
# ['Abelson\n', 'Abernathy\n']
# note that index 25 is the 26th item

Answer 4

You can do this very simply with this syntax that someone already mentioned, but it's by far the easiest way to do it:

inputFile = open("lineNumbers.txt", "r")
lines = inputFile.readlines()
print (lines[0])
print (lines[2])

Answer 5

A fast and compact approach could be:

def picklines(thefile, whatlines):
  return [x for i, x in enumerate(thefile) if i in whatlines]

this accepts any open file-like object thefile (leaving up to the caller whether it should be opened from a disk file, or via e.g a socket, or other file-like stream) and a set of zero-based line indices whatlines, and returns a list, with low memory footprint and reasonable speed. If the number of lines to be returned is huge, you might prefer a generator:

def yieldlines(thefile, whatlines):
  return (x for i, x in enumerate(thefile) if i in whatlines)

which is basically only good for looping upon -- note that the only difference comes from using rounded rather than square parentheses in the return statement, making a list comprehension and a generator expression respectively.

Further note that despite the mention of "lines" and "file" these functions are much, much more general -- they'll work on any iterable, be it an open file or any other, returning a list (or generator) of items based on their progressive item-numbers. So, I'd suggest using more appropriately general names;-).

Answer 6

if you want line 7

line = open("file.txt", "r").readlines()[7]