How to Read First N Lines of a File in Python?

Problem Formulation

Given a filename and an integer n.

How to read the first n lines of the file in your Python script?

Here’s an overview of the solutions:

Method 1: Store Head in a List of Strings

To read the first n lines of a given file and store each line in a list of strings, you can use list comprehension expression [next(file) for x in range(n)].

• The expression next(file) gets the next line of the file.
• The context for x in range(n) repeats this n times.

Here’s a code script in a file 'code.py' that reads the first n=4 lines of itself:

n = 4
filename = 'code.py'

with open(filename) as my_file:
    head = [next(my_file) for x in range(n)]
    
print(head)

The output is:

['n = 4\n', "filename = 'code.py'\n", '\n', 'with open(filename) as my_file:\n']

Method 2: Store Head in a String

You can also store the first n lines of a file in a single string using the following idea:

• Create an empty string variable head = ''
• Open the file with open(filename)
• Iterate n times using a for loop
• Appending the next line in the file to the end of the string head using string concatenation.

Here’s the specific code:

n = 4
filename = 'code.py'

head = ''
with open(filename) as my_file:
    for x in range(n):
        head += next(my_file)
    
print(head)

The print() function gives the following output:

n = 4
filename = 'code.py'
head = ''

Method 3: Slicing and readlines()

If performance is not an issue for you, you can read the whole file using the readlines() function and then use slicing to access only the first n lines. For example, file.readlines()[:n] would return a list of the n first lines in the file.

n = 4
filename = 'code.py'

with open(filename) as file:
    head = file.readlines()[:n]
    print(head)

The output of this code snippet is:

['n = 4\n', "filename = 'code.py'\n", '\n', 'with open(filename) as file:\n']

This is not a very performant way to read the head of a file because you first read the whole file before throwing away everything but the first n lines. Thus, you should only use it if the files are relatively small and you don’t care too much about performance.

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Method 4: Pandas

A simple and straightforward solution that doesn’t require explicit file I/O is provided by the pandas library. To read the first n lines of a file, you can use the pandas call pd.read_csv(filename, nrows=n).

For example, to read the first five lines of the file 'file.csv', the following two-liner will do:

import pandas as pd
head = pd.read_csv('file.csv', nrows=5)

You can check out my book “Coffee Break Pandas” to become a pandas expert using a fun puzzle-based learning approach.

🌍 Recommended Tutorial: How to Read the First Line of a File in Python?

Where to Go From Here?

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