reading in lines from a file -FAST!

[Adam]

Rajarshi Guha wrote:

> Hi
>  I have a file containing 168092 lines (each line a single word) and when
> I use
> 
> for line in f:
>   s = s + line
> 
> it takes for ages to read it all in - so long in fact that it makes the
> program unusable. Is there any way to do something like C's fread in
> Python so that I can just slurp in 1.7MB of data at one go, rather than
> reading line by line?
> 
> Thanks,
> Rajarshi

Assuming f is an open File Object, you can use:

string = f.read()

Which reads the entire content of f into string. Notice, though, that 
this solution isn't scalable: reading an entire file to memory becomes 
messier the larger the file, whereas reading it one line at a time works 
pretty much the same no matter how big the file is.

Adam