Fortran: Read data from a line in a file

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SUMMARY

The discussion centers on the challenge of reading a specific line (row number 90,000) from a large text file containing a matrix of 1,000,000 rows and 3 columns. The user seeks a method to access this line directly without sequentially reading the preceding lines, which would be inefficient. A suggested solution is to read the entire file into memory as a two-dimensional array, allowing for quick access to any element, including the desired row. This approach, while requiring an initial read time, significantly improves access speed for subsequent operations.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of Fortran file I/O operations
  • Familiarity with data structures, specifically two-dimensional arrays
  • Knowledge of memory management in programming
  • Basic concepts of matrix representation in programming
NEXT STEPS
  • Learn Fortran file handling techniques for efficient data reading
  • Explore memory allocation and management in Fortran
  • Study the implementation of two-dimensional arrays in Fortran
  • Investigate alternative data storage formats for large datasets, such as binary files
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This discussion is beneficial for Fortran developers, data scientists working with large datasets, and anyone involved in optimizing file I/O operations in programming.

sourish_SUNY
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This is my problem:
I would like to read data (saved in a text file) from a file. My data is written in a matrix format (1,000,000 rows x 3 columns).
I want to read a data from a particular line, say row number 90,000.
Since the number of rows is large, it will be very expensive if I have to do an empty read() for 89,999 rows.
Is there a way I can directly go to row number 90,000 (without reading the lines before it) and read the corresponding data? I do have control over how the text file is created.
Will really appreciate any help or advice on this.

Thank You,
SC
 
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sourish_SUNY said:
This is my problem:
I would like to read data (saved in a text file) from a file. My data is written in a matrix format (1,000,000 rows x 3 columns).
I want to read a data from a particular line, say row number 90,000.
Since the number of rows is large, it will be very expensive if I have to do an empty read() for 89,999 rows.
Is there a way I can directly go to row number 90,000 (without reading the lines before it) and read the corresponding data? I do have control over how the text file is created.
Will really appreciate any help or advice on this.
I can't imagine that this would work very well for you. You're trying to perform random access on an object whose normal mode of reading is sequential access. Although it might seem that the data in your file is in matrix form, in reality, the data is in 1,000,000 million lines. It might be more realistic to read the data from the file, and store it in memory in an actual matrix (a two-d array). You didn't say what kind of data, so I can't say how much memory the matrix would use. If each line in your file consists of three double precision numbers, (at eight bytes each), the matrix would use about 24,000,000 bytes, or about 24 MB.

It would take a while to read the data into memory, but once there, you could access any element in the 90,000 row pretty quickly.
 

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