in reply to sort large file

You could scan through and make a new file for each id and put the data for that id in the file. Then finding all data for an ID is just opening the right file and reading. I would recommend a database first but sometimes thats just not doable :-)

The orignal parse for this method might be slower but then seperate runs would be quicker. Unlike a hash solution this doesn't put everything into memory which means its persistent between different runs of the program.


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Eric Hodges