PARSE$ Wish

[John Kovacich]

I am working on a program which reads and converts various types of files
including packed files (with ZLIB). I used PARSECOUNT and PARSE$ to
read the unpacked buffer (for those of you unfamilliar with ZLIB, it
unpaks .zip files into a buffer in memory). This worked ok until I
came across some very large files which were painfully slow.

I reworked my parse loop until it was as tight as can be until it hit
me (DOH!) the PARSE$ must be counting from 1 to [x] every time I
request a specific record, and since these files were exceeding 15,000
records, this loop got longer and longer.

I solved my problem by using INSTR and parsing the file myself.

Now for my wish:

I wish I could parse a string into a string array:

DIM Buffer AS STRING
DIM File() AS STRING
DIM FileSize AS LONG
DIM crlf AS STRING

crlf=CHR$(13,10)

FileSize=PARSECOUNT(Buffer,crlf)
REDIM File(FileSize)

PARSE Buffer,crlf INTO FILE()

This would allow PARSE to be FAST, and we all like FAST.




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Thanks,

John Kovacich

[Michael Mattias]

That would certainly by fast to write, and perhaps some efficiencies could make it fast to execute.

But you could certainly write such a function using INSTR (sounds like you've aready done that) or with REGEXPR.

MCM