Of course it is. In text mode in Windows, \x0D\x0A is two bytes, but the single character.

But it's not just a Windows issue; it's also an encoding issue. If you set the encoding of DATA or of your FILE to be a multi-byte encoding such as UTF-8, then you'll have a discrepency between the number of characters and the number of bytes (even on unix) if you have any multi-byte characters in your DATA or in your FILE.

The whole point is that there is no way of knowing the number of characters in a file, since there's no relation between the size of the file and the number of characters in it.

It is therefore useless to "optimize" the value passed to read's third parameter, a number of characters (not bytes outside of :raw mode). Any value at least as large as the number of bytes in the file will do nicely.

In reply to Re^8: Extracting Data from a second line by ikegami
in thread Extracting Data from a second line by RCP

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