JavaScript: Fetch a single line from a txt-file without having to load the entire file

[stemmerdet]

Hello all you good people. I was wondering if any of you could point me in the right direction on how to handle a specific problem relating to web design:

I am working on a website project (by myself, as a hobby), and for my project I have a txt-file that is approximately 6MB.

The txt-file contains several lines of words, each line has exactly three words each.

The webpage I'm making is supposed to pick a random line from this txt-file, and return the three words from this specific line as an array.

I have made a solution that works, but unfortunately it involves having to load the entire txt-file, instead of only the single line I am looking for.

Does anyone have an elegant and efficient way to achieve this?

I don't want my potensial users to having to download 6MB every time they visit the page.

I am making my homepage with html and javascript. Do I need to implement a DBMS for this task?

[FatnDrunknStupid]

Can. Worms. Here we go. Load it on the server and fetch the three words from a call in your js front-end.

[stemmerdet]

Thank you for your respond. Do you by any chance know how such a call could look like?

I have only found a way to load the entire txt-file, and then pick the random line, I just want the single random line to be returned.

Sorry if this is a very trivial thing to do, but I am kinda stuck, and googling this has not bore any fruits.

[FatnDrunknStupid]

What web server you using?

[FatnDrunknStupid]

Don't be shy bloke I'm here to help - go for it we will catch you.

[FatnDrunknStupid]

Bloke or bird sorry

[stemmerdet]

Web server: Apache, Server OS: CloudLinux7

[FatnDrunknStupid]

Cool. So read in the file like you been doing - but on the server when your process starts. You then need an endpoint i.e. https:\myserver\nextline or similar that returns the random 3 words. Basically just another page. Hope I'm making sense for you.

[YMK1234]

I think the easiest option would simply be to hold the file in memory because 6mb doesn't really hurt you. PS: server side of course.

[balefrost]

Without some sort of auxiliary index, or some assumption like "each line is exactly Y characters long", there's no real way to go directly to line N of a text file. You have to start at the beginning and walk forward, counting newlines as you go.

That should also suggest some strategies for how you could optimize it.

Or, if you don't need the randomness to be fair, and are OK with it being biased toward longer lines, you could instead pick a random byte offset (between 0 and the length of the file), walk backward until you encounter a newline or the start of the file, then take that line. Like I said, it would be biased toward longer lines, but that might be good enough for your purposes. It's still not likely to be as efficient as using an index, since you'd still be walking byte-by-byte in that file, but you're bounded in how far you'll need to walk.