How to avoid using readlines()?

Question

I need to deal with super large txt input files, and I usually use .readlines() to first read the whole file, and turn it into a list.

I know it's really memory-cost and can be quite slow, but I also need to make use of LIST characteristics to manipulate the specific lines, like below:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os,sys
import glob
import commands
import gzip

path= '/home/xxx/scratch/'
fastqfiles1=glob.glob(path+'*_1.recal.fastq.gz')

for fastqfile1 in fastqfiles1:
    filename = os.path.basename(fastqfile1)
    job_id = filename.split('_')[0]
    fastqfile2 = os.path.join(path+job_id+'_2.recal.fastq.gz') 

    newfastq1 = os.path.join(path+job_id+'_1.fastq.gz') 
    newfastq2 = os.path.join(path+job_id+'_2.fastq.gz') 

    l1= gzip.open(fastqfile1,'r').readlines()
    l2= gzip.open(fastqfile2,'r').readlines()
    f1=[]
    f2=[]
    for i in range(0,len(l1)):
        if i % 4 == 3:
           b1=[ord(x) for x in l1[i]]
           ave1=sum(b1)/float(len(l1[i]))
           b2=[ord(x) for x in str(l2[i])]
           ave2=sum(b2)/float(len(l2[i]))
           if (ave1 >= 20 and ave2>= 20):
              f1.append(l1[i-3])
              f1.append(l1[i-2])
              f1.append(l1[i-1])
              f1.append(l1[i])
              f2.append(l2[i-3])
              f2.append(l2[i-2])
              f2.append(l2[i-1])
              f2.append(l2[i])
    output1=gzip.open(newfastq1,'w')
    output1.writelines(f1)
    output1.close()
    output2=gzip.open(newfastq2,'w')
    output2.writelines(f2)
    output2.close()

In general, I'm trying to read every 4th line of the whole text, but if the 4th line meets the desired condition, I'll append these 4 lines into the text. So can I avoid readlines() to achieve this? thx

EDIT: Hi, actually I myself found a better way:

import commands
 l1=commands.getoutput('zcat ' + fastqfile1).splitlines(True)
 l2=commands.getoutput('zcat ' + fastqfile2).splitlines(True)

I think 'zcat' is super fast.... It took around 15min to readlines, while only 1 minute to just zcat...

Answer 1

If you can refactor your code to read through the file linearly, then you can just say for line in file to iterate through each line of the file without reading it all into memory at once. But, since your file access looks more complicated, you could use a generator to replace readlines(). One way to do this would be to use itertools.izip or itertools.izip_longest:

def four_at_a_time(iterable):
    """Returns an iterator that returns a 4-tuple of objects at a time from the
       given iterable"""
    args = [iter(iterable) * 4]
    return itertools.izip(*args)
...
l1 = four_at_a_time(gzip.open(fastqfile1, 'r'))
l2 = four_at_a_time(gzip.open(fastqfile2, 'r'))
for i, x in enumerate(itertools.izip(l1, l2))
    # x is now a 2-tuple of 4-tuples of lines (one 4-tuple of lines from the first file,
    # and one 4-tuple of lines from the second file).  Process accordingly.