Read a small random sample from a big CSV file into a Python data frame

Question

The CSV file that I want to read does not fit into main memory. How can I read a few (~10K) random lines of it and do some simple statistics on the selected data frame?

Answer 1

No pandas!

import random
from os import fstat
from sys import exit

f = open('/usr/share/dict/words')

# Number of lines to be read
lines_to_read = 100

# Minimum and maximum bytes that will be randomly skipped
min_bytes_to_skip = 10000
max_bytes_to_skip = 1000000

def is_EOF():
    return f.tell() >= fstat(f.fileno()).st_size

# To accumulate the read lines
sampled_lines = []

for n in xrange(lines_to_read):
    bytes_to_skip = random.randint(min_bytes_to_skip, max_bytes_to_skip)
    f.seek(bytes_to_skip, 1)
    # After skipping "bytes_to_skip" bytes, we can stop in the middle of a line
    # Skip current entire line
    f.readline()
    if not is_EOF():
        sampled_lines.append(f.readline())
    else:
        # Go to the begginig of the file ...
        f.seek(0, 0)
        # ... and skip lines again
        f.seek(bytes_to_skip, 1)
        # If it has reached the EOF again
        if is_EOF():
            print "You have skipped more lines than your file has"
            print "Reduce the values of:"
            print "   min_bytes_to_skip"
            print "   max_bytes_to_skip"
            exit(1)
        else:
            f.readline()
            sampled_lines.append(f.readline())

print sampled_lines

You'll end up with a sampled_lines list. What kind of statistics do you mean?