READ FILE UNTIL THE Xth SPACE IS ENCOUNTERED...

[chr_w at gmx.de]

Hi list :-)

Yeah, I'm a python starter seeking for help once again... ;-) Seems as if I
start right the hard way with the coding tasks I have to solve here... :-(

I don't know if this has been covered before... Here's what I am trying
(amongst other things) to do:
"read in an ascii file until a given number of delminiting spaces has been
reached"
the file contains float numbers delimited by spaces (ASCII)

Motivation: I have massiv ASCII files containing floats delimited by spaces
and run out of memory when trying to get them into the machine in one piece
(followed by spliting into a list object).

What I am doing right now:
1) read in the entire file until EOF is reached
2) split into a list of strings
3) convert to float array

This works fine for my smaller files. But there are also some big bastards
to be done.
So:

What I want to do:
1) read the file until space number 63477 was encountered
2) take this string and split it into a list / followed by a conversion into
an float array
3) continue to read the file (until the next space no 63477 was read)
4) etc.

Don't worry about the number '63477': this is the sum of fields in an 3d
array I want to produce.
No idea how to do this, since all examples I found read until EOF or by
lines. Forgive me if I missed something really basic here - I just couldn't find
any related topic in the newsgroups or docs...

cheers,
christian


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