replace specific string in a txt file, but only in certain lines

Question

txt file with 40000 lines. In each lines are comma seperated numbers. I want to remove a specific number in the lines 36000 to 39000. For example number 233. But i dont want to remove the string from number 23341.

Here is my code so far:

with open("example.txt","r") as file:
newline =[]
i = 0
for l in file.readlines():
    if i>=36000 and i<=39000:
         newline.append(word.replace("233",""))
    else:
         newline.append(word.replace("233","233"))
    i = i + 1

with open("example.txt","w") as file:
for line in newline:
    f.writelines(line)

Is there a more elegant way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Iterating over a large text file with appending each line into a list to further overwrite the whole file - is definitely inefficient approach, use fileinput module and precompiled (with re.compile) regex pattern instead:

import fileinput, re

with fileinput.input('example.txt', inplace=True, encoding='utf-8') as f:
    pat = re.compile(r'\b233\b')
    for i, line in enumerate(f):
        if i >= 36000 and i <= 39000:
            line = pat.sub('', line)
        print(line, end='')