Reading and Processing Text File Efficiently

[Woo Mun Foong]

Hi,

I am writing a program that reads a text file and populate its contents into
a DBGrid
Each row inside is considered an record.
Each record is comprised of several fixed length columns
i.e: Product Column - 9, Barcode - 13, Width - 9, Weight - 9
Ex:
Prod-001 001-200-300 550.00 1100.2567
Prod-002 002-200-400 7100.00 1100.2567
Prod-0A 001-210-300 71000.00 1100.2567

I have 2 questions:-
1) Since the length/size of the text file can be vary.
How to write a code to get the no of lines in the files without looping
through the whole file ?

2) Which is more efficient ? Use collection or Dataset/Datatable to hold
those data?
Thank You.

[Brian Cryer]

"Woo Mun Foong" <mf***@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:BD**********************************@microsof t.com...

Hi,

I am writing a program that reads a text file and populate its contents
into
a DBGrid
Each row inside is considered an record.
Each record is comprised of several fixed length columns
i.e: Product Column - 9, Barcode - 13, Width - 9, Weight - 9
Ex:
Prod-001 001-200-300 550.00 1100.2567
Prod-002 002-200-400 7100.00 1100.2567
Prod-0A 001-210-300 71000.00 1100.2567

I have 2 questions:-
1) Since the length/size of the text file can be vary.
How to write a code to get the no of lines in the files without looping
through the whole file ?

2) Which is more efficient ? Use collection or Dataset/Datatable to hold
those data?
Thank You.

In answer to your first question, if the length of each line is variable
then there isn't any way to get the number of lines without reading through
the file. If you are worried about performance then think about caching the
result somewhere.

Sorry, can't advise on your second question.

Brian.

--
_ _ _ __ ___ ____ ______ ____ ___ __ _ _ _ _

Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian
_ _ _ __ ___ ____ ______ ____ ___ __ _ _ _ _

[thomasp]

My way of doing this was to read the file into an array. Mine had a little
more data to shuffle through but read it to the array very quickly. Once in
the array the user was notified of the number of records and some starting
and ending data. Then the user could choose at what record to start the
import and when.

Would be happy to send some of the code if this is what you wish to do.

Thomas

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[Woo Mun Foong]

Dear Thomas,

May I ?
I'm sure like to get hold of a piece of your code.

Thank You
mfwoo
"th*****@msala.net" wrote:

My way of doing this was to read the file into an array. Mine had a little
more data to shuffle through but read it to the array very quickly. Once in
the array the user was notified of the number of records and some starting
and ending data. Then the user could choose at what record to start the
import and when.

Would be happy to send some of the code if this is what you wish to do.

Thomas

--
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[Woo Mun Foong]

Dear Thomas,

May I ?
I'm sure like to get hold of a piece of your code.

Thank You
mfwoo
"th*****@msala.net" wrote:

My way of doing this was to read the file into an array. Mine had a little
more data to shuffle through but read it to the array very quickly. Once in
the array the user was notified of the number of records and some starting
and ending data. Then the user could choose at what record to start the
import and when.

Would be happy to send some of the code if this is what you wish to do.

Thomas

--
Posted via NewsDemon.com - Premium Uncensored Newsgroup Service
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Unlimited Access, Anonymous Accounts, Uncensored Broadband Access