Viewing a portion of a very large CSV file?
If you want to do somewhat more selective fishing for particular rows, then the python csv module will allow you to read the csv file row by row into Python data structures. Consult the documentation.
This may be useful if just grabbing the first hundred lines reveals nothing about many of the columns because they are blank in all those rows. So you could easily write a program in Python to read as many rows as it takes to find and write out a few rows with non-blank data in particular columns. Likewise if you want to analyze a subset of the data matching particular criteria, you can read all the rows in and write only the interesting ones out for further analysis.
An alternative to csv is pandas. Bigger learning curve, but it is probably the right tool for analyzing big data. (1Gb is not very big these days).
I have a ~1.0gb CSV file, and when trying to load it into Excel just to view, Excel crashes. I don't know the schema of the file, so it's difficult for me to load it into R or Python. The file contains restaurant reviews and has commas in it.
How can I open just a portion of the file (say, the first 100 rows, or 1.0mb's worth) in Windows Notepad or Excel?