Read n qty rows of delimited txt file in Python

Question

I have a large txt file that I want to read in python. It's tab delimited. I want to be able to read the headers as well. I saw this stackoverflow site but it doesn't show how to both designate the n qty of rows as well as determine the delimiter and line break: Read first N lines of a file in python

Answer 1

Pandas dataframe will help you do that automatically.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv(myfile,sep='\t')
df.head(n=5)  # for the 5 first lines of your file

For more info, see https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.read_csv.html#pandas.read_csv