Parsing large (9GB) file using python

Question

I have a large text file that I need to parse into a pipe delimited text file using python. The file looks like this (basically):

product/productId: D7SDF9S9         


        

Answer 1

Don't read the whole file into memory in one go; produce records by making use of those newlines. Write the data with the csv module for ease of writing out your pipe-delimited records.

The following code reads the input file line at a time, and writes out CSV rows per record as you go along. It never holds more than one line in memory, plus one record being constructed.

import csv
import re

fields = ('productId', 'userId', 'profileName', 'helpfulness', 'rating', 'time', 'summary', 'text')

with open("largefile.txt", "r") as myfile, open(outnamename,'w', newline='') as fw:
    writer = csv.DictWriter(fw, fields, delimiter='|')

    record = {}
    for line in myfile:
        if not line.strip() and record:
            # empty line is the end of a record
            writer.writerow(record)
            record = {}
            continue

        field, value = line.split(': ', 1)
        record[field.partition('/')[-1].strip()] = value.strip()

    if record:
        # handle last record
        writer.writerow(record)

This code does assume that the file contains text before a colon of the form category/key, so product/productId, review/userId, etc. The part after the slash is used for the CSV columns; the fields list at the top reflects these keys.

Alternatively, you can remove that fields list and use a csv.writer instead, gathering the record values in a list instead:

import csv
import re

with open("largefile.txt", "r") as myfile, open(outnamename,'wb') as fw:
    writer = csv.writer(fw, delimiter='|')

    record = []
    for line in myfile:
        if not line.strip() and record:
            # empty line is the end of a record
            writer.writerow(record)
            record = []
            continue

        field, value = line.split(': ', 1)
        record.append(value.strip())

    if record:
        # handle last record
        writer.writerow(record)

This version requires that record fields are all present and are written to the file in a fixed order.