title: python precautions to economize on size of text file of purely numerical characters
body: <p>I am tabulating a lot of output from some network analysis, listing an edge per line, which results in dozens of gigabytes, stretching the limits of my resources (understatement). As I only deal with numerical values, it occurred to me that I might be smarter than using the Py3k defaults. I.e. some other character encoding might save me quite some space if I only have digits (and space and the occasional decimal dot). As constrained I am, I might even save on the line endings (Not to have the Windows standard CRLF duplicate). What is the best practice on this?</p>
  
  <p>An example line would read like this:</p>
  
  <p>62233 242344 0.42442423</p>
  
  <p>(Where actually the last number is pointlessly precise, I will cut it back to three nonzero digits.)</p>
  
  <p>As I will need to read in the text file with other software (Stata, actually), I cannot keep the data in arbitrary binary, though I see no reason why Stata would only read UTF-8 text. Or you simply say that avoiding UTF-8 barely saves me anything?</p>
  
  <p>I think compression would not work for me, as I write the text line by line and it would be great to limit the output size even during this. I might easily be mistaken how compression works, but I thought it could save me space after the file is generated, but my issue is that my code crashes already as I am tabulating the text file (line by line).</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for all the ideas and clarifying questions!</p>