How can I filter which lines of a CSV to be loaded into memory using pandas? This seems like an option that one should find in read_csv. Am I missing something?

Example: we’ve a CSV with a timestamp column and we’d like to load just the lines that with a timestamp greater than a given constant.

There isn’t an option to filter the rows before the CSV file is loaded into a pandas object.

You can either load the file and then filter using df[df['field'] > constant], or if you have a very large file and you are worried about memory running out, then use an iterator and apply the filter as you concatenate chunks of your file e.g.:

import pandas as pd
iter_csv = pd.read_csv('file.csv', iterator=True, chunksize=1000)
df = pd.concat([chunk[chunk['field'] > constant] for chunk in iter_csv])

You can vary the chunksize to suit your available memory. See here for more details.

I didn’t find a straight-forward way to do it within context of read_csv. However, read_csv returns a DataFrame, which can be filtered by selecting rows by boolean vector df[bool_vec]:

filtered = df[(df['timestamp'] > targettime)]

This is selecting all rows in df (assuming df is any DataFrame, such as the result of a read_csv call, that at least contains a datetime column timestamp) for which the values in the timestamp column are greater than the value of targettime. Similar question.

If the filtered range is contiguous (as it usually is with time(stamp) filters), then the fastest solution is to hard-code the range of rows. Simply combine skiprows=range(1, start_row) with nrows=end_row parameters. Then the import takes seconds where the accepted solution would take minutes. A few experiments with the initial start_row are not a huge cost given the savings on import times. Notice we kept header row by using range(1,..).

If you are on linux you can use grep.

# to import either on Python2 or Python3
import pandas as pd
from time import time # not needed just for timing
try:
    from StringIO import StringIO
except ImportError:
    from io import StringIO


def zgrep_data(f, string):
    '''grep multiple items f is filepath, string is what you are filtering for'''

    grep = 'grep' # change to zgrep for gzipped files
    print('{} for {} from {}'.format(grep,string,f))
    start_time = time()
    if string == '':
        out = subprocess.check_output([grep, string, f])
        grep_data = StringIO(out)
        data = pd.read_csv(grep_data, sep=',', header=0)

    else:
        # read only the first row to get the columns. May need to change depending on 
        # how the data is stored
        columns = pd.read_csv(f, sep=',', nrows=1, header=None).values.tolist()[0]    

        out = subprocess.check_output([grep, string, f])
        grep_data = StringIO(out)

        data = pd.read_csv(grep_data, sep=',', names=columns, header=None)

    print('{} finished for {} - {} seconds'.format(grep,f,time()-start_time))
    return data

You can specify nrows parameter.

import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', nrows=100)

This code works well in version 0.20.3.