I want to go to line 34 in a .txt file and read it. How would you do that in Python?
Use Python Standard Library's linecache module:
line = linecache.getline(thefilename, 33)
should do exactly what you want. You don't even need to open the file -- linecache
does it all for you!
This code will open the file, read the line and print it.
# Open and read file into buffer
f = open(file,"r")
lines = f.readlines()
# If we need to read line 33, and assign it to some variable
x = lines[33]
print(x)
A solution that will not read more of the file than necessary is
from itertools import islice
line_number = 34
with open(filename) as f:
# Adjust index since Python/islice indexes from 0 and the first
# line of a file is line 1
line = next(islice(f, line_number - 1, line_number))
A very straightforward solution is
line_number = 34
with open(filename) as f:
f.readlines()[line_number - 1]
There's two ways:
f.readlines()
which will read the entire file into memory, and return it as a list of lines, then extract the 34th item from that list.Benefit: You only keep, in memory, the specific line you want.
code:
for i in xrange(34):
line = f.readline();
# when you get here, line will be the 34th line, or None, if there wasn't
# enough lines in the file
Benefit: Much less code
Downside: Reads the entire file into memory
Problem: Will crash if less than 34 elements are present in the list, needs error handling
line = f.readlines()[33]
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