Output data from subprocess command line by line - python-3.x

I am trying to read a large data file (= millions of rows, in a very specific format) using a pre-built (in C) routine. I want to then yeild the results of this, line by line, via a generator function.
I can read the file OK, but where as just running:
<command> <filename>
directly in linux will print the results line by line as it finds them, I've had no luck trying to replicate this within my generator function. It seems to output the entire lot as a single string that I need to split on newline, and of course then everything needs reading before I can yield line 1.
This code will read the file, no problem:
import subprocess
import config
file_cmd = '<command> <filename>'
for rec in (subprocess.check_output([file_cmd], shell=True).decode(config.ENCODING).split('\n')):
yield rec
(ENCODING is set in config.py to iso-8859-1 - it's a Swedish site)
The code I have works, in that it gives me the data, but in doing so, it tries to hold the whole lot in memory. I have larger files than this to process which are likely to blow the available memory, so this isn't an option.
I've played around with bufsize on Popen, but not had any success (and also, I can't decode or split after the Popen, though I guess the fact I need to split right now is actually my problem!).

I think I have this working now, so will answer my own question in the event somebody else is looking for this later ...
proc = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(file_cmd), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
while True:
output = proc.stdout.readline()
if output == b'' and proc.poll() is not None:
break
if output:
yield output.decode(config.ENCODING).strip()

Related

Why would a python script keep running after the output is generated (strange behavior)?

Background: The purpose of this script is to take eight very large (~7GB) FASTQ files, subsample each, and concatenate each subsample into one "master" FASTQ file. The resulting file is about 60GB. Each file is subsampled to 120,000,000 lines.
The issue: The basic purpose of this script is to output a huge file. I have print statements & time stamps in my code so I know that it goes through the entire script, processes the input files and creates the output files. After I see the final print statement, I go to my directory and see that the output file has been generated, it's the correct size, and it was last modified a while ago, despite the fact that the script is still running. At this point, however, the code has still not finished running, and it will actually stall there for about 2-3 hours before I can enter anything into my terminal again.
My code is behaving like it gets stuck on the last line of the script even after it's finished creating the output file.
I'm hoping someone might be able to identify what's causing this weird behavior. Below is a dummy version of what my script does:
import random
import itertools
infile1 = "sample1_1.fastq"
inFile2 = "sample1_2.fastq"
with open(infile1, 'r') as file_1:
f1 = file_1.read()
with open(inFile2, 'r') as file_2:
f2 = file_2.read()
fastq1 = f1.split('\n')
fastq2 = f2.split('\n')
def subsampleFASTQ(compile1, compile2):
random.seed(42)
random_1 = random.sample(compile1, 30000000)
random.seed(42)
random_2 = random.sample(compile2, 30000000)
return random_1, random_2
combo1, combo2 = subsampleFASTQ(fastq1, fastq2)
with open('sampleout_1.fastq', 'w') as out1:
out1.write('\n'.join(str(i) for i in combo1))
with open('sampleout_2.fastq', 'w') as out2:
out2.write('\n'.join(str(i) for i in combo2))
My ideas of what it could be:
File size is causing some slowness
There is some background process running in this script that wont let it finish (but i have no idea how to debug that-- any resources would be appreciated)

system is not writing into original dictionary file

def update(login_info):
stids = 001
file = open('regis.txt', 'r+')
for line in file:
if stids in line:
x = eval(line)
print(x)
c = input('what course you would like to update >> ')
get = x.get(c)
print('This is your current mark for the course', get)
mark = input('What is the new mark? >>')
g = mark.upper()
x.update({c: g})
file.write(str(x))
Before writing into the file
After writing into the file
This is what happens in the idle
As you can see, the system is not writing the data into the original dictionary. How can we improve on that? Pls, explain in detail. Thx all
Python doesn't just make relations like that. In Python's perspective, you are reading a regular text file, executing a command from the line read. That command creates an object which has no relationship to the line it was created from. But writing to the file should still work in my opinion. But you moved a line further (because you read the line where the data was and now you are at the end of it).
When you read a file, the position of where we are on the file changes. Iterating over the file like that (i.e for line in file:) invokes implicitly next() on the file. For efficiency reasons, positioning is disabled (file.tell() will not tell the current position). When you wrote to the file, for some reason you appended the text to the end, and if you test it it will no longer continue the loop even though it is still on the second line.
Reading and writing at the same time looks like an undefined behaviour.
Beginner Python: Reading and writing to the same file

shutil.copyfileobj but without headers or skip first line [duplicate]

I am currently using the below code to import 6,000 csv files (with headers) and export them into a single csv file (with a single header row).
#import csv files from folder
path =r'data/US/market/merged_data'
allFiles = glob.glob(path + "/*.csv")
stockstats_data = pd.DataFrame()
list_ = []
for file_ in allFiles:
df = pd.read_csv(file_,index_col=None,)
list_.append(df)
stockstats_data = pd.concat(list_)
print(file_ + " has been imported.")
This code works fine, but it is slow. It can take up to 2 days to process.
I was given a single line script for Terminal command line that does the same (but with no headers). This script takes 20 seconds.
for f in *.csv; do cat "`pwd`/$f" | tail -n +2 >> merged.csv; done
Does anyone know how I can speed up the first Python script? To cut the time down, I have thought about not importing it into a DataFrame and just concatenating the CSVs, but I cannot figure it out.
Thanks.
If you don't need the CSV in memory, just copying from input to output, it'll be a lot cheaper to avoid parsing at all, and copy without building up in memory:
import shutil
import glob
#import csv files from folder
path = r'data/US/market/merged_data'
allFiles = glob.glob(path + "/*.csv")
allFiles.sort() # glob lacks reliable ordering, so impose your own if output order matters
with open('someoutputfile.csv', 'wb') as outfile:
for i, fname in enumerate(allFiles):
with open(fname, 'rb') as infile:
if i != 0:
infile.readline() # Throw away header on all but first file
# Block copy rest of file from input to output without parsing
shutil.copyfileobj(infile, outfile)
print(fname + " has been imported.")
That's it; shutil.copyfileobj handles efficiently copying the data, dramatically reducing the Python level work to parse and reserialize. Don't omit the `allFiles.sort()!†
This assumes all the CSV files have the same format, encoding, line endings, etc., the encoding encodes such that newlines appear as a single byte equivalent to ASCII \n and it's the last byte in the character (so ASCII and all ASCII superset encodings work, as does UTF-16-BE and UTF-32-BE, but not UTF-16-LE and UTF-32-LE) and the header doesn't contain embedded newlines, but if that's the case, it's a lot faster than the alternatives.
For the cases where the encoding's version of a newline doesn't look enough like an ASCII newline, or where the input files are in one encoding, and the output file should be in a different encoding, you can add the work of encoding and decoding without adding CSV parsing/serializing work, with (adding a from io import open if on Python 2, to get Python 3-like efficient encoding-aware file objects, and defining known_input_encoding to some string representing the known encoding for input files, e.g. known_input_encoding = 'utf-16-le', and optionally a different encoding for output files):
# Other imports and setup code prior to first with unchanged from before
# Perform encoding to chosen output encoding, disabling line-ending
# translation to avoid conflicting with CSV dialect, matching raw binary behavior
with open('someoutputfile.csv', 'w', encoding=output_encoding, newline='') as outfile:
for i, fname in enumerate(allFiles):
# Decode with known encoding, disabling line-ending translation
# for same reasons as above
with open(fname, encoding=known_input_encoding, newline='') as infile:
if i != 0:
infile.readline() # Throw away header on all but first file
# Block copy rest of file from input to output without parsing
# just letting the file object decode from input and encode to output
shutil.copyfileobj(infile, outfile)
print(fname + " has been imported.")
This is still much faster than involving the csv module, especially in modern Python (where the io module has undergone greater and greater optimization, to the point where the cost of decoding and reencoding is pretty minor, especially next to the cost of performing I/O in the first place). It's also a good validity check for self-checking encodings (e.g. the UTF family) even if the encoding is not supposed to change; if the data doesn't match the assumed self-checking encoding, it's highly unlikely to decode validly, so you'll get an exception rather than silent misbehavior.
Because some of the duplicates linked here are looking for an even faster solution than copyfileobj, some options:
The only succinct, reasonably portable option is to continue using copyfileobj and explicitly pass a non-default length parameter, e.g. shutil.copyfileobj(infile, outfile, 1 << 20) (1 << 20 is 1 MiB, a number which shutil has switched to for plain shutil.copyfile calls on Windows due to superior performance).
Still portable, but only works for binary files and not succinct, would be to copy the underlying code copyfile uses on Windows, which uses a reusable bytearray buffer with a larger size than copyfileobj's default (1 MiB, rather than 64 KiB), removing some allocation overhead that copyfileobj can't fully avoid for large buffers. You'd replace shutil.copyfileobj(infile, outfile) with (3.8+'s walrus operator, :=, used for brevity) the following code adapted from CPython 3.10's implementation of shutil._copyfileobj_readinto (which you could always use directly if you don't mind using non-public APIs):
buf_length = 1 << 20 # 1 MiB buffer; tweak to preference
# Using a memoryview gets zero copy performance when short reads occur
with memoryview(bytearray(buf_length)) as mv:
while n := infile.readinto(mv):
if n < buf_length:
with mv[:n] as smv:
outfile.write(smv)
else:
outfile.write(mv)
Non-portably, if you can (in any way you feel like) determine the precise length of the header, and you know it will not change by even a byte in any other file, you can write the header directly, then use OS-specific calls similar to what shutil.copyfile uses under the hood to copy the non-header portion of each file, using OS-specific APIs that can do the work with a single system call (regardless of file size) and avoid extra data copies (by pushing all the work to in-kernel or even within file-system operations, removing copies to and from user space) e.g.:
a. On Linux kernel 2.6.33 and higher (and any other OS that allows the sendfile(2) system call to work between open files), you can replace the .readline() and copyfileobj calls with:
filesize = os.fstat(infile.fileno()).st_size # Get underlying file's size
os.sendfile(outfile.fileno(), infile.fileno(), header_len_bytes, filesize - header_len_bytes)
To make it signal resilient, it may be necessary to check the return value from sendfile, and track the number of bytes sent + skipped and the number remaining, looping until you've copied them all (these are low level system calls, they can be interrupted).
b. On any system Python 3.8+ built with glibc >= 2.27 (or on Linux kernel 4.5+), where the files are all on the same filesystem, you can replace sendfile with copy_file_range:
filesize = os.fstat(infile.fileno()).st_size # Get underlying file's size
os.copy_file_range(infile.fileno(), outfile.fileno(), filesize - header_len_bytes, header_len_bytes)
With similar caveats about checking for copying fewer bytes than expected and retrying.
c. On OSX/macOS, you can use the completely undocumented, and therefore even less portable/stable API shutil.copyfile uses, posix._fcopyfile for a similar purpose, with something like (completely untested, and really, don't do this; it's likely to break across even minor Python releases):
infile.seek(header_len_bytes) # Skip past header
posix._fcopyfile(infile.fileno(), outfile.fileno(), posix._COPYFILE_DATA)
which assumes fcopyfile pays attention to the seek position (docs aren't 100% on this) and, as noted, is not only macOS-specific, but uses undocumented CPython internals that could change in any release.
† An aside on sorting the results of glob: That allFiles.sort() call should not be omitted; glob imposes no ordering on the results, and for reproducible results, you'll want to impose some ordering (it wouldn't be great if the same files, with the same names and data, produced an output file in a different order simply because in-between runs, a file got moved out of the directory, then back in, and changed the native iteration order). Without the sort call, this code (and all other Python+glob module answers) will not reliably read from a directory containing a.csv and b.csv in alphabetical (or any other useful) order; it'll vary by OS, file system, and often the entire history of file creation/deletion in the directory in question. This has broken stuff before in the real world, see details at A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies.
Are you required to do this in Python? If you are open to doing this entirely in shell, all you'd need to do is first cat the header row from a randomly selected input .csv file into merged.csv before running your one-liner:
cat a-randomly-selected-csv-file.csv | head -n1 > merged.csv
for f in *.csv; do cat "`pwd`/$f" | tail -n +2 >> merged.csv; done
You don't need pandas for this, just the simple csv module would work fine.
import csv
df_out_filename = 'df_out.csv'
write_headers = True
with open(df_out_filename, 'wb') as fout:
writer = csv.writer(fout)
for filename in allFiles:
with open(filename) as fin:
reader = csv.reader(fin)
headers = reader.next()
if write_headers:
write_headers = False # Only write headers once.
writer.writerow(headers)
writer.writerows(reader) # Write all remaining rows.
Here's a simpler approach - you can use pandas (though I am not sure how it will help with RAM usage)-
import pandas as pd
import glob
path =r'data/US/market/merged_data'
allFiles = glob.glob(path + "/*.csv")
stockstats_data = pd.DataFrame()
list_ = []
for file_ in allFiles:
df = pd.read_csv(file_)
stockstats_data = pd.concat((df, stockstats_data), axis=0)

Python 3 combining file open and read commands - a need to close a file and how?

I am working through "Learn Python 3 the Hard Way" and am making code more concise. Lines 11 to 18 of the program below (line 1 starts at # program: p17.py) are relevant to my question. Opening and reading a file are very easy and it is easy to see how you close the file you open when working with the files. The original section is commented out and I include the concise code on line 16. I commented out the line of code that causes an error (on line 20):
$ python3 p17_aside.py p17_text.txt p17_to_file_3.py
Copying from p17_text.txt to p17_to_file_3.py
This is text.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "p17_aside.py", line 20, in
indata.close()
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'close'
Code is below:
# program: p17.py
# This program copies one file to another. It uses the argv function as well
# as exists - from sys and os.path modules respectively
from sys import argv
from os.path import exists
script, from_file, to_file = argv
print(f"Copying from {from_file} to {to_file}")
# we could do these two on one line, how?
#in_file = open(from_file)
#indata = in_file.read()
#print(indata)
# THE ANSWER -
indata = open(from_file).read()
# The next line was used for testing
print(indata)
# indata.close()
So my question is should I just avoid the practice of combining commands as done above or is there a way to properly deal with that situation so files are closed when they should be? Is it necessary to deal with the situation of closing a file at all in this situation?
Context manager and with statement is a comfortable way to make sure your file is closed as needed:
with open(from_file) as fobj:
indata = fobj.read()
Nowadays, you can also use Path-like objects and their read_text and read_bytes methods:
# This assumes Path from pathlib has been imported
indata = Path(from_file).read_text()
The error you were seeing... is because you were not trying to close the file, but str into which you've read its content into. You'd need to assign object returned by open a name, and then read from and close that one:
fobj = open(from_file)
indata = fobj.read()
fobj.close() # This is OK
Strictly speaking, you would not need to close that file as dangling file descriptors would be "clobbered" with the process. Esp. in a short example like this, it would be of relatively little concern.
I hope I got the follow up question in comment correctly to extend on this a bit more.
If you wanted a single command, look at the pathtlib.Path example above.
With open as such, you cannot perform read and close in a single operation and without assigning result of open to a variable. As both read and close would have to be performed on the same object returned by open. If you do:
var = fobj.read()
Now, var refers to content read out of the file (so nothing that you could close, would have a close method).
If you did:
open(from_file).close()
After (but also before; at any point), you would simply open that file (again) and close it immediately. BTW. this returns None, just in case you wanted to get the return value. But it would not affect previously open file handles and file-like objects. It would not serve any practical purpose except for perhaps making sure you can open a file.
But again. It's a good practice to perform the housekeeping, but strictly speaking (and esp. in a short code like this). If you did not close the file and relied on the OS to clean-up after your process. It'd work fine.
How about the following:
# to open the file and read it
indata = open(from_file).read()
print(indata)
# this closes the file - just the opposite of opening and reading
open(from_file).close()

file.read() not working as intended in string comparison

stackoverflow.
I've been trying to get the following code to create a .txt file, write some string on it and then print some message if said string was in the file. This is merely a study for a more complex project, but even given it's simplicity, it's still not working.
Code:
import io
file = open("C:\\Users\\...\\txt.txt", "w+") #"..." is the rest of the file destination
file.write('wololo')
if "wololo" in file.read():
print ("ok")
This function always skips the if as if there was no "wololo" inside the file, even though I've checked it all times and it was properly in there.
I'm not exactly sure what could be the problem, and I've spend a great deal of time searching everywhere for a solution, all to no avail. What could be wrong in this simple code?
Oh, and if I was to search for a string in a much bigger .txt file, would it still be wise to use file.read()?
Thanks!
When you write to your file, the cursor is moved to the end of your file. If you want to read the data aferwards, you'll have to move the cursor to the beginning of the file, such as:
file = open("txt.txt", "w+")
file.write('wololo')
file.seek(0)
if "wololo" in file.read():
print ("ok")
file.close() # Remember to close the file
If the file is big, you should consider to iterate over the file line by line instead. This would avoid that the entire file is stored in memory. Also consider using a context manager (the with keyword), so that you don't have to explicitly close the file yourself.
with open('bigdata.txt', 'rb') as ifile: # Use rb mode in Windows for reading
for line in ifile:
if 'wololo' in line:
print('OK')
else:
print('String not in file')

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