Given a text file, provide a quick and easy way to return a range of lines

lines_range_in_a_file.py

"""
Given a text file, provide a quick and easy way to return a range of
lines
"""

from itertools import islice


def select_lines(iterable, start_line, last_line):
    # text lines usually 1-based, whereas islice is 0-base ==> -1
    return islice(iterable, start_line - 1, last_line)

#
# Test it out: we want lines 5-10 inclusive
#
START_LINE = 5
LAST_LINE = 10
with open('data.txt') as f:
    for line in select_lines(f, START_LINE, LAST_LINE):
        print line.strip()

Alternately, we can use linecache