[Tutor] Fastest way to iterate through a file

[Robert Hicks]

Kent Johnson wrote:
> Robert Hicks wrote:
>> This is the loop code:
>>
>> for line in f2:
>>      for id in idList:
>>          if id in line:
>>              print "%s: %s" % (id, f2.next())
>>              found = "%s: %s" % (id, f2.next())
>>              f3.write(found)
>>
>>
>> I have an list, idList[], that contains a list of id numbers. That code 
>> will loop the the f2 file and for lines that have an id on it it will 
>> print the "next" line (so I can see what it is doing) and write it to a 
>> file. I will turn off that screen print after I get it going the way I 
>> want it to.
> 
> I don't see any particular reason this should be slow unless idList is 
> large. Perhaps the output is being buffered somewhere and not appearing 
> until the process is done? How are you running the program?
> 
> BTW the line that you print and the line that you save to the file are 
> not the same; every time you call f2.next() it will fetch another line 
> from the file. If you want them to be the same you could say
>               found = "%s: %s" % (id, f2.next())
>               print found
>               f3.write(found)
> 

Thanks for that!

idList only has about 129 id numbers in it.

I am running it straight from a Linux console. I thought about buffering 
but I am not sure how Python handles that.

Do you know if Python has a "slower" startup time than Perl? That could 
be part of it though I suspect the buffering thing more.

Robert