Reading a large file line by line in Python

Question

I want to iterate over each line of an entire file. One way to do this is by reading the entire file, saving it to a list, then going over the line of interest. This method uses a lot of memory, so I am looking for an alternative.

My code so far:

for each_line in fileinput.input(input_file):
    do_something(each_line)
    for each_line_again in fileinput.input(input_file):
        do_something(each_line_again)

Executing this code gives an error message: device active.

Any suggestions?

The purpose is to calculate pair-wise string similarity, meaning for each line in file, I want to calculate the Levenshtein distance with every other line.

Answer 1

The correct, fully Pythonic way to read a file is the following:

with open(...) as f:
    for line in f:
         # Do something with 'line'

The with statement handles opening and closing the file, including if an exception is raised in the inner block. The for line in f treats the file object f as an iterable, which automatically uses buffered I/O and memory management so you don't have to worry about large files.