How to read specific lines of a large csv file

Question

I am trying to read some specific rows of a large csv file, and I don't want to load the whole file into memory. The index of the specific rows are given in a list L = [2, 5, 15, 98, ...] and my csv file looks like this:

Col 1, Col 2, Col3
row11, row12, row13
row21, row22, row23
row31, row32, row33
...

Using the ideas mentioned here I use the following command to read the rows

with open('~/file.csv') as f:
    r = csv.DictReader(f) # I need to read it as a dictionary for my purpose

    for i in L:
        for row in enumerate(r):
            print row[i]

I immediately get the following error:

IndexError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-25-78951a0d4937> in <module>()
      6     for i in L:
      7         for row in enumerate(r):
----> 8             print row[i]
IndexError: tuple index out of range

Question 1. It seems like my use of the for loops here is obviously wrong. Any ideas on how to fix this?

On the other hand, the following gets the job done, but it's too slow:

def read_csv_line(line_number):
    with open("~/file.csv") as f:
        r = csv.DictReader(f)
        for i, line in enumerate(r):
            if i == (line_number - 2):
                return line
    return None

for i in L:
    print read_csv_line(i)

Question 2. Any idea on how to improve this basic method of going through the whole file until I reach row i then print it?

Answer 1

Assuming L is a list containing the line numbers you want, you could do :

with open("~/file.csv") as f:
    r = csv.DictReader(f)
    for i, line in enumerate(r):
        if i in L:    # or (i+2) in L: from your second example
            print line

That way :

• you read the file only once
• you do not load the whole file in memory
• you only get the lines you are interested in

The only caveat is that you read whole file even if L = [3]

Answer 2

A file doesn't have "lines" or "rows". What you consider a "line" is "what is found between two newline characters". As such you cannot read the nth line without reading the lines before it, as you couldn't count the newline characters.

Answer 1: if you consider your example, but with L=[9], unrolling your loops would give:

i=9
row = (0, {'Col 2': 'row12', 'Col 3': 'row13', 'Col 1': 'row11'})

As you can see, row is a tuple with two members, calling row[i] means row[9], hence the IndexError.

Answer 2: This is very slow because you are reading the file up to the line number every time. In your example, you read the first 2 lines, then the first 5, then the first 15, then the first 98, etc. So you've read the first 5 lines 3 times. You could create a generator that only returns the lines you want (beware, line numbers would be 0-indexed):

def read_my_lines(csv_reader, lines_list):
    for line_number, row in enumerate(csv_reader):
        if line_number in lines_list:
            yield line_number, row

So when you want to process the lines, you would do:

L = [2, 5, 15, 98, ...]
with open('~/file.csv') as f:
    r = csv.DictReader(f)
    for line_number, line in read_my_lines(r, L):
        do_something_with_line(line)

* Edit *

This could further be improved to stop reading the file when you've read all the lines you wanted:

def read_my_lines(csv_reader, lines_list):
    # make sure every line number shows up only once:
    lines_set = set(lines_list)
    for line_number, row in enumerate(csv_reader):
        if line_number in lines_set:
            yield line_number, row
            lines_set.remove(line_number)
            # Stop when the set is empty
            if not lines_set:
                raise StopIteration