Python Pandas: How to read only first n rows of CSV files in?

I have a very large data set and I can’t afford to read the entire data set in. So, I’m thinking of reading only one chunk of it to train but I have no idea how to do it. Any thought will be appreciated.

Answers:

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Method 1

If you only want to read the first 999,999 (non-header) rows:

read_csv(..., nrows=999999)

If you only want to read rows 1,000,000 … 1,999,999

read_csv(..., skiprows=1000000, nrows=999999)

nrows : int, default None Number of rows of file to read. Useful for
reading pieces of large files*

skiprows : list-like or integer
Row numbers to skip (0-indexed) or number of rows to skip (int) at the start of the file

and for large files, you’ll probably also want to use chunksize:

chunksize : int, default None
Return TextFileReader object for iteration

pandas.io.parsers.read_csv documentation

Method 2

If you do not want to use Pandas, you can use csv library and to limit row readed with interaction break.

For example, I needed to read a list of files stored in csvs list to get the only the header.

for csvs in result:
    csvs = './'+csvs
    with open(csvs,encoding='ANSI', newline='') as csv_file:
        csv_reader = csv.reader(csv_file, delimiter=',')
        count=0
        for row in csv_reader:
            if count:
                break;

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