Background:
I'm cleaning large (cannot be held in memory) tab-delimited files. As I clean the input file, I build up a list in memory; when it gets to 1,000,000 entries (about 1GB in memory) I sort it (using the default key below) and write the list to a file. This class is for putting the sorted files back together. It works on the files I have encountered thus far. My largest case, so far, is merging 66 sorted files.
Questions:
- Are there holes in my logic (where is it fragile)?
- Have I implemented the merge-sort algorithm correctly?
- Are there any obvious improvements that could be made?
Example Data:
This is an abstraction of a line in one of these files:
'hash_of_SomeStringId\tSome String Id\t\t\twww.somelink.com\t\tOtherData\t\n'
The takeaway is that I use 'SomeStringId'.lower().replace(' ', '') as my sort key.
Original Code:
class SortedFileMerger():
""" A one-time use object that merges any number of smaller sorted
files into one large sorted file.
ARGS:
paths - list of paths to sorted files
output_path - string path to desired output file
dedup - (boolean) remove lines with duplicate keys, default = True
key - use to override sort key, default = "line.split('\t')[1].lower().replace(' ', '')"
will be prepended by "lambda line: ". This should be the same
key that was used to sort the files being merged!
"""
def __init__(self, paths, output_path, dedup=True, key="line.split('\t')[1].lower().replace(' ', '')"):
self.key = eval("lambda line: %s" % key)
self.dedup = dedup
self.handles = [open(path, 'r') for path in paths]
# holds one line from each file
self.lines = [file_handle.readline() for file_handle in self.handles]
self.output_file = open(output_path, 'w')
self.lines_written = 0
self._mergeSortedFiles() #call the main method
def __del__(self):
""" Clean-up file handles.
"""
for handle in self.handles:
if not handle.closed:
handle.close()
if self.output_file and (not self.output_file.closed):
self.output_file.close()
def _mergeSortedFiles(self):
""" Merge the small sorted files to 'self.output_file'. This can
and should only be called once.
Called from __init__().
"""
previous_comparable = ''
min_line = self._getNextMin()
while min_line:
index = self.lines.index(min_line)
comparable = self.key(min_line)
if not self.dedup:
#not removing duplicates
self._writeLine(index)
elif comparable != previous_comparable:
#removing duplicates and this isn't one
self._writeLine(index)
else:
#removing duplicates and this is one
self._readNextLine(index)
previous_comparable = comparable
min_line = self._getNextMin()
#finished merging
self.output_file.close()
def _getNextMin(self):
""" Returns the next "smallest" line in sorted order.
Returns None when there are no more values to get.
"""
while '' in self.lines:
index = self.lines.index('')
if self._isLastLine(index):
# file.readline() is returning '' because
# it has reached the end of a file.
self._closeFile(index)
else:
# an empty line got mixed in
self._readNextLine(index)
if len(self.lines) == 0:
return None
return min(self.lines, key=self.key)
def _writeLine(self, index):
""" Write line to output file and update self.lines
"""
self.output_file.write(self.lines[index])
self.lines_written += 1
self._readNextLine(index)
def _readNextLine(self, index):
""" Read the next line from handles[index] into lines[index]
"""
self.lines[index] = self.handles[index].readline()
def _closeFile(self, index):
""" If there are no more lines to get in a file, it
needs to be closed and removed from 'self.handles'.
It's entry in 'self.lines' also need to be removed.
"""
handle = self.handles.pop(index)
if not handle.closed:
handle.close()
# remove entry from self.lines to preserve order
_ = self.lines.pop(index)
def _isLastLine(self, index):
""" Check that handles[index] is at the eof.
"""
handle = self.handles[index]
if handle.tell() == os.path.getsize(handle.name):
return True
return False
Edit: Implementing the suggestions from Brian I came up with the following solution:
Second Edit: Updated the code per John Machin's suggestion:
def decorated_file(f, key):
""" Yields an easily sortable tuple.
"""
for line in f:
yield (key(line), line)
def standard_keyfunc(line):
""" The standard key function in my application.
"""
return line.split('\t', 2)[1].replace(' ', '').lower()
def mergeSortedFiles(paths, output_path, dedup=True, keyfunc=standard_keyfunc):
""" Does the same thing SortedFileMerger class does.
"""
files = map(open, paths) #open defaults to mode='r'
output_file = open(output_path, 'w')
lines_written = 0
previous_comparable = ''
for line in heapq26.merge(*[decorated_file(f, keyfunc) for f in files]):
comparable = line[0]
if previous_comparable != comparable:
output_file.write(line[1])
lines_written += 1
previous_comparable = comparable
return lines_written
Rough Test
Using the same input files (2.2 GB of data):
- SortedFileMerger class took 51 minutes (3068.4 seconds)
- Brian's solution took 40 minutes (2408.5 seconds)
- After adding John Machin's suggestions, the solution code took 36 minutes (2214.0 seconds)