How can I read large text files in Python, line by line, without loading it into memory?

Question

I need to read a large file, line by line. Lets say that file has more than 5GB and I need to read each line, but obviously I do not want to use readlines() bec

Answer 1

The blaze project has come a long way over the last 6 years. It has a simple API covering a useful subset of pandas features.

dask.dataframe takes care of chunking internally, supports many parallelisable operations and allows you to export slices back to pandas easily for in-memory operations.

import dask.dataframe as dd

df = dd.read_csv('filename.csv')
df.head(10)  # return first 10 rows
df.tail(10)  # return last 10 rows

# iterate rows
for idx, row in df.iterrows():
    ...

# group by my_field and return mean
df.groupby(df.my_field).value.mean().compute()

# slice by column
df[df.my_field=='XYZ'].compute()