How to read specific lines of a large csv file

Question

I am trying to read some specific rows of a large csv file, and I don\'t want to load the whole file into memory. The index of the specific rows are given in a list L

Answer 1

Just to sum up the great ideas, I ended up using something like this: L can be sorted relatively quickly, and in my case it was actually already sorted. So, instead of several membership checks in L it pays off to sort it and then only check each index against the first entry of it. Here is my piece of code:

count=0
with open('~/file.csv') as f:
    r = csv.DictReader(f)
    for row in r:
        count += 1
        if L == []:
            break
        elif count == L[0]:
            print (row)
            L.pop(0)

Note that this stops as soon as we've gone through L once.