That character would be a ^Z, which is an end-of-file indicator for microsoft.
I can already hear people asking "Why the need for an EOF character when MS file systems record an exact byte count?" Ok, maybe it's just the usual voices in my head that I hear, but for at least their edification, I'll explain. MSDOS was written to be as compatible as possible with THE business OS of the day: CP/M. In CP/M, file sizes were recorded by 128 byte (256 bytes?) block count only - no byte count. Thus, text files needed an EOF character to show where the text ended. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Vladimir Zelinski Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 7:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Hitting a line limit while reading a file A while ago I had a weird problem on Perl for Windows. My program exited from while(<INPUT>) loop because of a character in the data file which was treated as EOF. After removing the character from the data file loop continued up to the very end. I didn't have time to investigate the problem and I can't say what the character was. Try to look at data where your loop is terminated. Thank you, Vladimir --- Sisyphus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Howard Maher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 5:34 AM > Subject: Hitting a line limit while reading a file > > > >I was simply counting the number of lines in a 2 > gig file, printing to > >STDERR every 10,000 lines to indicate the program > was making progress, but > >the program stopped at 12,960,000 lines read... an > hour and a half later it > >still hadn't budged... > > What kind of memory issue could I have hit? > > This is a Windows 2000 box with 512 Meg of RAM. > > > > Code that was executing: > > > > open(INPUT,"$infilename") or die "couldn't open > $infilename for read, > > stopped at: $!"; > > my $line_num; > > while ( <INPUT> ) > > { > > $line_num++; > > print STDERR "$line_num\r" unless > $line_num%10000; > > } > > > > There's no need to count the lines yourself. The special variable $. > does that for you. (See 'perldoc perlvar): > > while(<INPUT>) { > print STDERR "$.\r" unless $. % 10000; } > > I don't know what the problem is, and I think it's unlikely that > change will fix things. But it's something you could try. > > Cheers, > Rob > > > > _______________________________________________ > Perl-Win32-Users mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe: > http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs > _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
