textfile utility module ======================= First, import the module:: from dataIO import textfile Having encoding problem in Python2? Do this:: text = "English, 䏿–‡, ã«ã»ã‚“ã”, руÌÑÑкий ÑзыÌк, ..." textfile.write(text, "text.txt") # write text = textfile.read("text.txt") # read If you have a file with special encoding, do this:: text = textfile.read("text.txt", encoding="Your encoding") **If you don't know the encoding**, you can let ``dataIO`` smartly decided for you. This feature requires ``chardet``, just do ``pip install chardet``. :: text = textfile.smartread("text.txt") Have lots of text file downloaded from Internet, but the encoding is messed up? You can easily encode them to utf-8 by doing this:: to_utf8("download.txt") # automatically generate a new file, you never lose your old file. You probably need `skip first M lines, and fetch next N lines` read patter, and you don't want to read a super big file into your memory, now you should do this:: # skip first 2 lines, fetch next 1000 lines for line in textfile.readlines("text.txt", skiplines=2, nlines=1000, strip="right"): print(line) # do what ever you want with this line For parameter explanation, read this :meth:`~dataIO.textfile.readlines` ``readchunks`` method doing similar things. The only difference is reading multiple line at a time as a chunk, then yield. Here's a example usage:: Group ID, Series ID 1, 1 1, 2 1, 3 2, 1 2, 2 2, 3 3, 1 3, 2 3, 3 Then you can do this:: for chunk in textfile.readchunks("text.txt", skiplines=1, chunksize=3): print(chunk) # do what ever you want with this chunk