Select every nth row as a Pandas DataFrame without reading the entire file - pandas

Question

I am reading a large file that contains ~9.5 million rows x 16 cols.
I am interested in retrieving a representative sample, and since the data is organized by time, I want to do this by selecting every 500th element.
I am able to load the data, and then select every 500th row.
My question: Can I immediately read every 500th element (using.pd.read_csv() or some other method), without having to read first and then filter my data?
Question 2: How would you approach this problem if the date column was not ordered? At the moment, I am assuming it's ordered by date, but all data is prone to errors.
Here is a snippet of what the data looks like (first five rows) The first 4 rows are out of order, bu the remaining dataset looks ordered (by time):
VendorID tpep_pickup_datetime tpep_dropoff_datetime passenger_count trip_distance RatecodeID store_and_fwd_flag PULocationID DOLocationID payment_type fare_amount extra mta_tax tip_amount tolls_amount improvement_surcharge total_amount
0 1 2017-01-09 11:13:28 2017-01-09 11:25:45 1 3.30 1 N 263 161 1 12.5 0.0 0.5 2.00 0.00 0.3 15.30
1 1 2017-01-09 11:32:27 2017-01-09 11:36:01 1 0.90 1 N 186 234 1 5.0 0.0 0.5 1.45 0.00 0.3 7.25
2 1 2017-01-09 11:38:20 2017-01-09 11:42:05 1 1.10 1 N 164 161 1 5.5 0.0 0.5 1.00 0.00 0.3 7.30
3 1 2017-01-09 11:52:13 2017-01-09 11:57:36 1 1.10 1 N 236 75 1 6.0 0.0 0.5 1.70 0.00 0.3 8.50
4 2 2017-01-01 00:00:00 2017-01-01 00:00:00 1 0.02 2 N 249 234 2 52.0 0.0 0.5 0.00 0.00 0.3 52.80

Answer 1

Can I immediately read every 500th element (using.pd.read_csv() or some other method), without having to read first and then filter my data?
Something you could do is to use the skiprows parameter in read_csv, which accepts a list-like argument to discard the rows of interest (and thus, also select). So you could create a np.arange with a length equal to the amount of rows to read, and remove every 500th element from it using np.delete, so this way we'll only be reading every 500th row:
n_rows = 9.5e6
skip = np.arange(n_rows)
skip = np.delete(skip, np.arange(0, n_rows, 500))
df = pd.read_csv('my_file.csv', skiprows = skip)

Answer 2

Can I immediately read every 500th element (using.pd.read_csv() or some other method), without having to read first and then filter my data?
First get the length of the file by a custom function, remove each 500 row by numpy.setdiff1d and pass to the skiprows parameter in read_csv:
#https://stackoverflow.com/q/845058
def file_len(fname):
with open(fname) as f:
for i, l in enumerate(f):
pass
return i + 1
len_of_file = file_len('test.csv')
print (len_of_file)
skipped = np.setdiff1d(np.arange(len_of_file), np.arange(0,len_of_file,500))
print (skipped)
df = pd.read_csv('test.csv', skiprows=skipped)
How would you approach this problem if the date column was not ordered? At the moment, I am assuming it's ordered by date, but all data is prone to errors.
The idea is read only the datetime column by parameter usecols, and then sort and select each 500 index value, get the difference and pass again to parameter skiprows:
def file_len(fname):
with open(fname) as f:
for i, l in enumerate(f):
pass
return i + 1
len_of_file = file_len('test.csv')
df1 = pd.read_csv('test.csv',
usecols=['tpep_pickup_datetime'],
parse_dates=['tpep_pickup_datetime'])
sorted_idx = (df1['tpep_pickup_datetime'].sort_values()
.iloc[np.arange(0,len_of_file,500)].index)
skipped = np.setdiff1d(np.arange(len_of_file), sorted_idx)
print (skipped)
df = pd.read_csv('test.csv', skiprows=skipped).sort_values(by=['tpep_pickup_datetime'])

Answer 3

use a lambda with skiprows:
pd.read_csv(path, skiprows=lambda i: i % N)
to skip every N rows.
source: https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.read_csv.html

Answer 4

You can use csv module return a iterator and use itertools.cycle to select every nth row.
import csv
from itertools import cycle
source_file='D:/a.txt'
cycle_size=500
chooser = (x == 0 for x in cycle(range(cycle_size)))
with open(source_file) as f1:
rdr = csv.reader(f1)
data = [row for pick, row in zip(chooser, rdr) if pick]