Re: [dev] Best way to serialize data

On 2011-06-06 21:06, Džen wrote:
> Pretty much answers my question. In my use case it'd be easier to use
> delimiters like \0 or \n, due to the data not being binary. However now
> I wonder, which method would need more cpu time? I suppose that when
> using delimiters there isn't a easier way than using fgetc(), reading
> through the whole data stream. Hard-coded field lengths would be faster
> if the fields contain a lot of characters I guess.

It would probably be easier/faster to read the whole file into a buffer ahead
of time, then parse it afterwards. That way you can read in larger chunks and
don't have to do a whole bunch of calls to fgetc. There have been a billion
functions written to do this already so you can probably just use one of
those..

Regardless of what you do, the time it takes to parse the file will probably be
insignificant compared to the amount of time it takes to read the file from
disk.

If you use \0 as the delimiter for all your cells, then you can just use
pointers into the buffer for your table because all the strings are already
null-terminated.

For example:
  char *table[rows][cols];
  char *data = readfile(stdin);
  for (r in rows)
  for (c in cols)
          table[r][c] = data;
          data += strlen(data)+1;