If you truly wish to kill yourself trying to make it as efficient memory as
possible, then you can follow this example. (This is more like what I would
write in C).
The getrandomline function picks a random byte between the beginning and the
end of the file, then backs up until the beginning of the line and uses
readline to return the whole line.
I tested it :-)
#############################################
from os import stat
from random import randint
def getrandomline(f, length):
pos = randint(0,length)
f.seek(pos)
while f.read(1)!='\n':
try:
f.seek(-2,1)
except IOError: # This is to catch seeking before the
beginning of the file
f.seek(0)
return f.readline()
f = file("quotes.txt","rb")
sizeoffile = stat("quotes.txt")[6]
while (1):
print getrandomline(f, sizeoffile),
f.close()
###################################
This holds at 3,688 K mem usage, whereas with the same file (100,000 lines),
using readlines gives me 47,724 K. Big difference. Maybe not important to
you, but I'm strange.
Hope this helps.
JS
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