[cupidvogel]

Hi, I am seeing that both pieces of code:

a = open("foo.txt","r")
print a.readlines()[0]

and

from linecache import *
print getline("foo.txt",1)

do the same thing, i.e print the first line of the given text file. So what is the necessity of the linecache module when the inbuilt file methods can do its task? Or is there some performance issues?

This post has been edited by cupidvogel: 20 January 2012 - 07:42 AM

[Motoma]

Quoth the manual, "The linecache module allows one to get any line from any file, while attempting to optimize internally, using a cache, the common case where many lines are read from a single file."

[cupidvogel]

So it means that using readlines() extracts all the lines from the file (which might be useless, as I am looking for one particular line only), then necessitates extracting the required line from the resulting list, while linecache extracts that line only, without extracting the other lines as well?

[Motoma]

The source for the linecache module is pretty short.

[cupidvogel]

Cool.