I have this quite big CSV file (15 Gb) and I need to read about 1 million random lines from it. As far as I can see - and implement - the CSV utility in Python only allows to iterate sequentially in the file. It's very memory consuming to read the all file into memory to use some random choosing and it's very time consuming to go trough all the file and discard some values and choose others, so, is there anyway to choose some random line from the CSV file and read only that line? I tried without success: import csv with open('linear_e_LAN2A_F_0_435keV.csv') as file: reader = csv.reader(file) print reader[someRandomInteger] A sample of the CSV file: 331.093,329.735 251.188,249.994 374.468,373.782 295.643,295.159 83.9058,0 380.709,116.221 352.238,351.891 183.809,182.615 257.277,201.302 61.4598,40.7106