I've been writing a lot of utility programs for my clients who are users of a certain legacy database application - exporting, reporting, pretty label printing, etc. The database is normalized into 45 files, each of which contains fixed-length records (ranging from 80 bytes to 1024). A few of those files contain relatively few records, while others - depending how long the users have worked with the application - may contain millions of records; the transaction file is generally the largest and consists of 256-byte records.
(Before anybody asks, yes! I know that the best way to do this would be to use the database engine that created the files. Unfortunately, that's not really an option.) I am NOT writing back to the data file. I seem to have two alternatives - read the file one record at a time (which means I spend a ridiculous amount of time waiting for the disk), or read the whole thing at once and process it in memory (which, depending on the user's machine, will probably choke on a 250MB transaction file.) My question is this: does anybody know of an equivalent to "readlines(sizehint)" for non-delimited, binary files? I've Googled and Googled until I'm groggy, but I don't seem to find what I want. Thanks! -- www.fsrtechnologies.com _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
