Reading a specific line from CSV file

Question

I have a ten line CSV file. From this file, I only want the, say, fourth line. What's the quickest way to do this? I'm looking for something like:

with open(file, 'r') as my_file:
    reader = csv.reader(my_file)
    print reader[3]

where reader[3] is obviously incorrect syntax for what I want to achieve. How do I move the reader to line 4 and get it's content?

Answer 1

If all you have is 10 lines, you can load the whole file into a list:

with open(file, 'r') as my_file:
    reader = csv.reader(my_file)
    rows = list(reader)
    print rows[3]

For a larger file, use itertools.islice() :

from itertools import islice

with open(file, 'r') as my_file:
    reader = csv.reader(my_file)
    print next(islice(reader, 3, 4))