Sorry for the delay, but I got distracted by work. :) Records tend to be 1300 characters in length and need to be separated into 80+ fields.

I apologize for not posting it before, but here's the code that does the bulk of the work.

while (<IN>) {
    
    $record = "";
    
    @values = unpack($template, $_);
    
    foreach $field (@values) {
        $field =~ s/\s+$//;
        $record .= "\"" . $field . "\"" . $sep;
    }
    
    chop($record);
    $record .= "\n";
    print OUT $record;
}

[download]

I was able to trim the time down to just under 8 minutes on my 1.6 GHz P4 with ActiveState Perl. The original figure was on a Solaris server running Perl version 5.005_03.

I thought about accumulating several delimited records (say, 100 or so) into a single string to reduce the number of print commands. I thought this might reduce the I/O overhead. Anyone know if that will work or if it's just wishful thinking? :)

Many thanks for all the suggestions. :)

Larry Polk

In reply to Re: Re: What's the most efficient way to write out many lines of data? by Anonymous Monk
in thread What's the most efficient way to write out many lines of data? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.