OK, I feel quite foolish... almost immediately after hitting 'send' I realized I can implement this myself, using 'read(bigsize)' - currently I'm using 'read(recordsize)'; I just need to add an extra loop around my record reads. Please disregard...
On Nov 16, 2007 11:10 AM, Marc Tompkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > -- www.fsrtechnologies.com _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
