How to read file N lines at a time in Python?

One solution would be a list comprehension and the slice operator:

with open(filename, 'r') as infile:
    lines = [line for line in infile][:N]

After this lines is tuple of lines. However, this would load the complete file into memory. If you don't want this (i.e. if the file could be really large) there is another solution using a generator expression and islice from the itertools package:

from itertools import islice
with open(filename, 'r') as infile:
    lines_gen = islice(infile, N)

lines_gen is a generator object, that gives you each line of the file and can be used in a loop like this:

for line in lines_gen:
    print line

Both solutions give you up to N lines (or fewer, if the file doesn't have that much).

A file object is an iterator over lines in Python. To iterate over the file N lines at a time, you could use grouper() itertools' recipe (see What is the most “pythonic” way to iterate over a list in chunks?):

#!/usr/bin/env python2

from itertools import izip_longest

def grouper(iterable, n, fillvalue=None):
    args = [iter(iterable)] * n
    return izip_longest(*args, fillvalue=fillvalue)

Example

with open(filename) as f:
     for lines in grouper(f, N, ''):
         assert len(lines) == N
         # process N lines here

This code will work with any count of lines in file and any N. If you have 1100 lines in file and N = 200, you will get 5 times to process chunks of 200 lines and one time with 100 lines.

with open(filename, 'r') as infile:
    lines = []
    for line in infile:
        lines.append(line)
        if len(lines) >= N:
            process(lines)
            lines = []
    if len(lines) > 0:
        process(lines)