Specify how much "a lot of data" is. Are we talking thousands of lines or millions or billions? Personally I would split on white space, then do something like:

if($line[1]=="0109") { $sum += $line[2]; $n+=1; }

I ran this on a file with 1000000 lines and it took about 3 seconds to run. There were 83333 matches for that particular date.

The complexity is O(n) so it should scale linearly with increased input sizes.

In reply to Re: Calculating the average on a timeslice of data by zek152
in thread Calculating the average on a timeslice of data by perlbrother

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