Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe

👻 Check our latest review to choose the best laptop for Machine Learning engineers and Deep learning tasks!

Is there a built-in way to use read_csv to read only the first n lines of a file without knowing the length of the lines ahead of time? I have a large file that takes a long time to read, and occasionally only want to use the first, say, 20 lines to get a sample of it (and prefer not to load the full thing and take the head of it).

If I knew the total number of lines I could do something like footer_lines = total_lines - n and pass this to the skipfooter keyword arg. My current solution is to manually grab the first n lines with python and StringIO it to pandas:

import pandas as pd
from StringIO import StringIO

n = 20
with open("big_file.csv", "r") as f:
    head = "".join(f.readlines(n))

df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(head))

It"s not that bad, but is there a more concise, "pandasic" (?) way to do it with keywords or something?

👻 Read also: what is the best laptop for engineering students?

We hope this article has helped you to resolve the problem. Apart from Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe, check other code Python module-related topics.

Want to excel in Python? See our review of the best Python online courses 2023. If you are interested in Data Science, check also how to learn programming in R.

By the way, this material is also available in other languages:

• Italiano Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Deutsch Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Français Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Español Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Türk Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Русский Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Português Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Polski Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• Nederlandse Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• 中文 Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• 한국어 Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• 日本語 Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe
• हिन्दी Way to read first few lines for pandas dataframe