first, second, etc line of text file

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2007-07-25, George Sakkis <george.sakkis at gmail.com> wrote:
> For random access, the easiest way is to slurp all the file in
> a list using file.readlines().

A lazy evaluation scheme might be useful for random access that
only slurps as much as you need.

class LazySlurper(object):
    r""" Lazily read a file using readline, allowing random access to the
    results with __getitem__.

    >>> import StringIO
    >>> infile = StringIO.StringIO(
    ... "Line 0\n"
    ... "Line 1\n"
    ... "Line 2\n"
    ... "Line 3\n"
    ... "Line 4\n"
    ... "Line 5\n"
    ... "Line 6\n"
    ... "Line 7\n")
    >>> slurper = LazySlurper(infile)
    >>> print slurper[0],
    Line 0
    >>> print slurper[5],
    Line 5
    >>> print slurper[1],
    Line 1
    >>> infile.close()
    """
    def __init__(self, fileobj):
        self.fileobj = fileobj
        self.upto = 0
        self.lines = []
        self._readupto(0)
    def _readupto(self, n):
        while self.upto <= n:
            line = self.fileobj.readline()
            if line == "":
                break
            self.lines.append(line)
            self.upto += 1
    def __getitem__(self, n):
        self._readupto(n)
        return self.lines[n]

-- 
Neil Cerutti
Eddie Robinson is about one word: winning and losing. --Eddie Robinson's agent
Paul Collier