Using the Read from Text File Function I am able to easily read the first line of my file. However I now want it to read the second line. It would be great to just a for loop or something if I could specify the line number somewhere. Is there a way to do so? Thanks!
First, you can read the entire file as lines by right-clicking on the Read From Text File node and selecting "Read Lines". One read will return an array containing one element for each line and you can work with the lines with regular array handling methods. If you want to read each line individually, you can by wiring a 1 into the Count input and looping. Each iteration will return an array with one element (the current line read). You can get/set the offset (in bytes) to specify where in the file you want to read, but that's not necessary if I read your question correctly.
Related
I am currently learning Go, and I need to read the final line in a text file.
I have searched everywhere and there does not seem to be a definitive explanation on how one would do this.
How would I do this?
Starting the search from the very beginning of the file can be an expensive option esp. if your file(s) are large.
A better option may be to - Use os.Open to open the file and stat method (https://golang.org/pkg/os/#File.Stat) to get the size of the file. Start reading from end of the file using ReadAt (https://golang.org/pkg/os/#File.ReadAt - read the last byte first, second last byte next..), all the way reverse till you find the second newline character. That's the beginning of the last line. Hope this helps.
I want to compare particular line of two text file and update one of the file if they are not same.
Updating a line in a text file is technically not possible (unless the replacing line is of exactly the same length). You have to create a new file, which you can, in the end, move to the old one.
From your tags, I assume that you are looking for a shell solution, which is maybe not a good idea. It's probably more convenient to do it in, for instance, Perl or Ruby or Python.
One possibility is to use the commands head and tail, which allow you to dissect a file into parts. You can split your file into three parts: The part before the line in question, the line itself, and the lines which come after.
Another possibility is to use a loop and the read command of the shell to process a file line by line, like this:
while read line
do
... # Decide here, whether to write $line or the replacement line
done <your_file
I have a large CSV with a large number of columns. I am trying to count the number of lines using
File.open(file).readlines.to_a.compact.count.to_i
It displays 57 although there are only 56 rows. Upon close examination I found that a part of one line is wrapped to form the next line. How to get the correct count?
Upon close examination I found that a part of one line is wrapped to form the next line. How to get the correct count?
You need to show an example of the incoming data if you want us to help beyond generic answers.
To fix the problem, you have to be able to identify the line. We can't help you there because it could look like anything. Making a wild guess, I'd say that one of the columns had an embedded new-line in it, which forces the line to wrap.
It the file is a true CSV file, that column should be wrapped in double-quotes, so you could search the file for lines that do NOT end with whatever data type should be in the last column, then read the next line, join them, then rewrite the file. But, again, we have nothing to work with, because your file's format could be a huge number of different things.
Your best bet is to use the CSV class that comes with Ruby, and let it read the file, instead of trying to treat it like a text file. CSV files are text, but they are formatted to maintain the columns and rows, so using the CSV class will give you a better chance of getting at the data.
Looking at your code:
There are a number of ways to count the number of lines in a file, including the easiest which is:
`wc -l /path/to/file`.to_i
if you're using *nix.
Using File.open(file).readlines.to_a is horribly redundant and not fast or scalable if your file is big.
readlines returns an array.
to_a returns an array.
Why turn the array into an array?
readlines loads an entire file into memory, then splits it on line ends into an array. That process can be a lot slower than simply reading the file line-by-line and incrementing a counter, plus "slurping" can make your program crawl if the file is larger than available memory.
See "Why is "slurping" a file not a good practice?" for more information.
compact removes nils from an array. readlines should never return any nils so compact will iterate over the array looking for something that shouldn't exist.
count returns an integer.
to_i converts the receiver to an integer.
In other words, to_i is turning an integer into an integer. Why?
If you want to do it in Ruby instead of using wc -l, do something simple and fast:
lines_in_file = 0
File.foreach(some_file) { lines_in_file += 1 }
After running that, lines_in_file will contain the number of lines read. Memory won't be impacted and it'll run like blue blazes on huge files.
VBA question
There is a large log file (around 500,000 lines), I need to read it line by line in reverse order, i.e. from the last line to the first line.
I know I can use FileSystemObject in the Microsoft Scripting Runtime reference, but there is no such option like reverse for ReadLine Method in TextStream
Now, the only way I can think of is like this, has a counter and skip previous lines for each of the line I read, but definitely this is not good enough. Any suggestion code/algo will be much appreciated.
If your log is a kind of database with field which allows to determine the order (is there a date field or line number field), if so you could try to use ADO solution with SQL query to read the log in reverse order (ORDER BY ... DESC). So, you will be able to read from last to first. Or generally- try to use ADO.
A file is not line based, or even character based, it's just bytes so there is no way to read lines in reverse order in a file. How the text is separated into lines is only determined by where there are line break characters in the text.
You can read lines from the beginning and store them in a rotating buffer, so that you have for example the last 1000 lines in the buffer when you reach the end of the file. That way you have a certain number of lines that you can access from your buffer without having to read the entire file for every single line.
After that you know how many lines there are in the file, so when you need to refill the buffer you can just skip a certain number of lines and read the following lines into the buffer.
Using Ruby, I am reading a file line by line, using IO.gets to incrementally read the next line of the file. Under certain circumstances I want to do the opposite (look at the previous line by decrementing). The way I tried to accomplish this was...
IO.lineno = int
IO.gets
It seems that no matter what I set "lineno" to equal it still just reads the next line when I follow up by calling "gets". How should I go about reading previous lines in the file?
You need to use
IO.readlines("myfile")
This returns the file as an array of strings and then iterate over it with indizies. With a stream there is no way to go back one line.