How to get line count cheaply in Python?

Question

I need to get a line count of a large file (hundreds of thousands of lines) in python. What is the most efficient way both memory- and time-wise?

At the moment I do:

def file_len(fname):
    with open(fname) as f:
        for i, l in enumerate(f):
            pass
    return i + 1

is it possible to do any better?

Answer 1

I would use Python's file object method readlines, as follows:

with open(input_file) as foo:
    lines = len(foo.readlines())

This opens the file, creates a list of lines in the file, counts the length of the list, saves that to a variable and closes the file again.

Answer 2

def file_len(full_path):
  """ Count number of lines in a file."""
  f = open(full_path)
  nr_of_lines = sum(1 for line in f)
  f.close()
  return nr_of_lines

Answer 3

I got a small (4-8%) improvement with this version which re-uses a constant buffer so it should avoid any memory or GC overhead:

lines = 0
buffer = bytearray(2048)
with open(filename) as f:
  while f.readinto(buffer) > 0:
      lines += buffer.count('\n')

You can play around with the buffer size and maybe see a little improvement.

Answer 4

Another possibility:

import subprocess

def num_lines_in_file(fpath):
    return int(subprocess.check_output('wc -l %s' % fpath, shell=True).strip().split()[0])

Answer 5

Here is a python program to use the multiprocessing library to distribute the line counting across machines/cores. My test improves counting a 20million line file from 26 seconds to 7 seconds using an 8 core windows 64 server. Note: not using memory mapping makes things much slower.

import multiprocessing, sys, time, os, mmap
import logging, logging.handlers

def init_logger(pid):
    console_format = 'P{0} %(levelname)s %(message)s'.format(pid)
    logger = logging.getLogger()  # New logger at root level
    logger.setLevel( logging.INFO )
    logger.handlers.append( logging.StreamHandler() )
    logger.handlers[0].setFormatter( logging.Formatter( console_format, '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S' ) )

def getFileLineCount( queues, pid, processes, file1 ):
    init_logger(pid)
    logging.info( 'start' )

    physical_file = open(file1, "r")
    #  mmap.mmap(fileno, length[, tagname[, access[, offset]]]

    m1 = mmap.mmap( physical_file.fileno(), 0, access=mmap.ACCESS_READ )

    #work out file size to divide up line counting

    fSize = os.stat(file1).st_size
    chunk = (fSize / processes) + 1

    lines = 0

    #get where I start and stop
    _seedStart = chunk * (pid)
    _seekEnd = chunk * (pid+1)
    seekStart = int(_seedStart)
    seekEnd = int(_seekEnd)

    if seekEnd < int(_seekEnd + 1):
        seekEnd += 1

    if _seedStart < int(seekStart + 1):
        seekStart += 1

    if seekEnd > fSize:
        seekEnd = fSize

    #find where to start
    if pid > 0:
        m1.seek( seekStart )
        #read next line
        l1 = m1.readline()  # need to use readline with memory mapped files
        seekStart = m1.tell()

    #tell previous rank my seek start to make their seek end

    if pid > 0:
        queues[pid-1].put( seekStart )
    if pid < processes-1:
        seekEnd = queues[pid].get()

    m1.seek( seekStart )
    l1 = m1.readline()

    while len(l1) > 0:
        lines += 1
        l1 = m1.readline()
        if m1.tell() > seekEnd or len(l1) == 0:
            break

    logging.info( 'done' )
    # add up the results
    if pid == 0:
        for p in range(1,processes):
            lines += queues[0].get()
        queues[0].put(lines) # the total lines counted
    else:
        queues[0].put(lines)

    m1.close()
    physical_file.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    init_logger( 'main' )
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        file_name = sys.argv[1]
    else:
        logging.fatal( 'parameters required: file-name [processes]' )
        exit()

    t = time.time()
    processes = multiprocessing.cpu_count()
    if len(sys.argv) > 2:
        processes = int(sys.argv[2])
    queues=[] # a queue for each process
    for pid in range(processes):
        queues.append( multiprocessing.Queue() )
    jobs=[]
    prev_pipe = 0
    for pid in range(processes):
        p = multiprocessing.Process( target = getFileLineCount, args=(queues, pid, processes, file_name,) )
        p.start()
        jobs.append(p)

    jobs[0].join() #wait for counting to finish
    lines = queues[0].get()

    logging.info( 'finished {} Lines:{}'.format( time.time() - t, lines ) )

Answer 6

one line solution

import os
os.system("wc -l  filename")  

my snippet

os.system('wc -l *.txt')

0 bar.txt
1000 command.txt
3 test_file.txt
1003 total