On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 at 04:37, Marco Sulla <marco.sulla.pyt...@gmail.com> wrote: > > What about introducing a method for text streams that reads the lines > from the bottom? Java has also a ReversedLinesFileReader with Apache > Commons IO.
It's fundamentally difficult to get precise. In general, there are three steps to reading the last N lines of a file: 1) Find out the size of the file (currently, if it's being grown) 2) Seek to the end of the file, minus some threshold that you hope will contain a number of lines 3) Read from there to the end of the file, split it into lines, and keep the last N Reading the preceding N lines is basically a matter of repeating the same exercise, but instead of "end of the file", use the byte position of the line you last read. The problem is, seeking around in a file is done by bytes, not characters. So if you know for sure that you can resynchronize (possible with UTF-8, not possible with some other encodings), then you can do this, but it's probably best to build it yourself (opening the file in binary mode). This is quite inefficient in general. It would be far FAR easier to do this instead: 1) Read the entire file and decode bytes to text 2) Split into lines 3) Iterate backwards over the lines Tada! Done. And in Python, quite easy. The downside, of course, is that you have to store the entire file in memory. So it's up to you: pay the memory price, or pay the complexity price. Personally, unless the file is tremendously large and I know for sure that I'm not going to end up iterating over it all, I would pay the memory price. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
