Selective file read in Ruby

Question

I have a huge file that looks like this:

7

bla1
blala
blabla
blab
blals
blable
bla

more here..

The first numbers tells how many values I will have. The thing, is that i just want to point directly to the line 11 (text "more here.."), without having to read all those values before. In my case, I have a big amount of numbers, so it has to be optimized.

Would you recommend me something?

Answer 1

You could probably use File#seek to randomly access the file.

The problem with that approach is that it will just access data at a specified byte offset - not a line offset. If your file could give the byte offset at the start of the file to where the list finishes, then you could use that.