In reply to Tye's comments... I appreciate the in-depth commentary. This is where I'm going to learn some real perl. To give some background that might clear up why I wrote the code the way I did: I'm running perl on a Win98 system. I'm writing a piece of code that accepts a collection of text files from a legacy database along with a configuration file and generates a series of reports in MS Excel. The text files are comma-delimited and in a specific, reliable format (for example, no '\n' at the end of file), allowing for some of the assumptions I made. I tested the code above on several of these files and achieved the correct results each time. The reports are extremely time-sensitive, and routinely sum to over 40MB of data. I need the routines to be fast and quick - although I take to heart Tye's comment that fast code is less important than correct code. One question I still have: what effect does binmode have on the data? In WinBlows it looks as though I still end up with text in my final array, regardless of whether I use binmode. In that case, switching to binmode and gaining the speed increase seems reasonable. Thanks.

In reply to Re: Why use <$fh> at all? by cluka
in thread Why use <$fh> at all? by cluka

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