How to read specific part of large file in Python
parsing, python
Solution
You can `seek` into the file the file and then read a certain amount from there. Seek allows you to get to a specific offset within a file, and then you can limit your read to only the number of bytes in that range.
with open(filename) as fin:
fin.seek(start_index)
data = fin.read(end_index - start_index)
That will only read that data that you're looking for.
Problem
Given a large file (hundreds of MB) how would I use Python to quickly read the content between a specific start and end index within the file? Essentially, I'm looking for a more efficient way of doing: ``` open(filename).read()[start_index:end_index] ```