Obtaining total number of records from .tfrecords file in Tensorflow

Question

Is it possible for obtain the total number of records from a .tfrecords file ? Related to this, how does one generally keep track of the number of epochs that h

Answer 1

No it is not possible. TFRecord does not store any metadata about the data being stored inside. This file

represents a sequence of (binary) strings. The format is not random access, so it is suitable for streaming large amounts of data but not suitable if fast sharding or other non-sequential access is desired.

If you want, you can store this metadata manually or use a record_iterator to get the number (you will need to iterate through all the records that you have:

sum(1 for _ in tf.python_io.tf_record_iterator(file_name))

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If you want to know the current epoch, you can do this either from tensorboard or by printing the number from the loop.