Reading a file line by line in Go

Question

In Go 1.1 and newer the most simple way to do this is with a bufio.Scanner. Here is a simple example that reads lines from a file:

package main

import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    file, err := os.Open("/path/to/file.txt")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer file.Close()

    scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file)
    // optionally, resize scanner's capacity for lines over 64K, see next example
    for scanner.Scan() {
        fmt.Println(scanner.Text())
    }

    if err := scanner.Err(); err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
}

This is the cleanest way to read from a Reader line by line.

There is one caveat: Scanner will error with lines longer than 65536 characters. If you know your line length is greater than 64K, use the Buffer() method to increase the scanner's capacity:

...
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file)

const maxCapacity = longLineLen  // your required line length
buf := make([]byte, maxCapacity)
scanner.Buffer(buf, maxCapacity)

for scanner.Scan() {
...

NOTE: The accepted answer was correct in early versions of Go. See the highest voted answer contains the more recent idiomatic way to achieve this.

There is function ReadLine in package bufio.

Please note that if the line does not fit into the read buffer, the function will return an incomplete line. If you want to always read a whole line in your program by a single call to a function, you will need to encapsulate the ReadLine function into your own function which calls ReadLine in a for-loop.

bufio.ReadString('\n') isn't fully equivalent to ReadLine because ReadString is unable to handle the case when the last line of a file does not end with the newline character.

EDIT: As of go1.1, the idiomatic solution is to use bufio.Scanner

I wrote up a way to easily read each line from a file. The Readln(*bufio.Reader) function returns a line (sans \n) from the underlying bufio.Reader struct.

// Readln returns a single line (without the ending \n)
// from the input buffered reader.
// An error is returned iff there is an error with the
// buffered reader.
func Readln(r *bufio.Reader) (string, error) {
  var (isPrefix bool = true
       err error = nil
       line, ln []byte
      )
  for isPrefix && err == nil {
      line, isPrefix, err = r.ReadLine()
      ln = append(ln, line...)
  }
  return string(ln),err
}

You can use Readln to read every line from a file. The following code reads every line in a file and outputs each line to stdout.

f, err := os.Open(fi)
if err != nil {
    fmt.Printf("error opening file: %v\n",err)
    os.Exit(1)
}
r := bufio.NewReader(f)
s, e := Readln(r)
for e == nil {
    fmt.Println(s)
    s,e = Readln(r)
}

Cheers!

There two common way to read file line by line.

1. Use bufio.Scanner
2. Use ReadString/ReadBytes/... in bufio.Reader

In my testcase, ~250MB, ~2,500,000 lines, bufio.Scanner(time used: 0.395491384s) is faster than bufio.Reader.ReadString(time_used: 0.446867622s).

Source code: https://github.com/xpzouying/go-practice/tree/master/read_file_line_by_line

Read file use bufio.Scanner,

func scanFile() {
    f, err := os.OpenFile(logfile, os.O_RDONLY, os.ModePerm)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("open file error: %v", err)
        return
    }
    defer f.Close()

    sc := bufio.NewScanner(f)
    for sc.Scan() {
        _ = sc.Text()  // GET the line string
    }
    if err := sc.Err(); err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("scan file error: %v", err)
        return
    }
}

Read file use bufio.Reader,

func readFileLines() {
    f, err := os.OpenFile(logfile, os.O_RDONLY, os.ModePerm)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("open file error: %v", err)
        return
    }
    defer f.Close()

    rd := bufio.NewReader(f)
    for {
        line, err := rd.ReadString('\n')
        if err != nil {
            if err == io.EOF {
                break
            }

            log.Fatalf("read file line error: %v", err)
            return
        }
        _ = line  // GET the line string
    }
}