Optimizing Line Jumping in Large Text Files

Processing massive text files line by line can be inefficient when seeking a specific line. The provided code iterates through every line of a 15MB file to reach the desired line number, neglecting the fact that the required line may be located much earlier in the file.

An Alternative Approach

To address this issue, consider employing an optimization technique that leverages line offsets. This involves reading the entire file once to construct a list containing the starting offset of each line.

Implementation

line_offset = []   # List to store line offsets
offset = 0          # Current offset

# Loop through each line in the file
for line in file:
    line_offset.append(offset)    # Store the current line offset
    offset  = len(line)         # Update the offset for the next line

file.seek(0)           # Reset the file pointer to the beginning

Usage

To skip to a specific line (n), simply seek to the corresponding offset:

line_number = n
file.seek(line_offset[line_number])

This approach eliminates the need to process all intermediate lines, resulting in significant performance improvement for large files.