Re: Re: character-by-character in a huge file

One character each time, why not? Perl already buffers the file so getc should be faster than a lot of magic with substr (or unpack).

Comment on Re: Re: character-by-character in a huge file

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Re: Re: Re: character-by-character in a huge file by bart (Canon) on Apr 10, 2004 at 12:26 UTC
It depends on the frequency of the matches. I'm convinced that one call to `index`() on a string of 10k, with a negative result, or just a few matches, is a lot faster than 10000 calls to `getc`() and the same number of `eq` tests. It's a matter of doing the same task in C, or in Perl. C usually wins hands down.	[reply]