I use Dreamweaver as my editor, mainly because I'm familiar with it, although I only use about 1% of its capabilities. However it generally handles long files well. The other day I downloaded the two shortest of Brian Dunning's sets of test data *. I opened the shortest in Dreamweaver, had a quick look at it, and realised I would have to replace the quote, comma, quote separators with semicolons, as part of converting the files to my format.
So I thought I would do that while I was working out what else I had to do. I entered the old separator and the replacement in the 'Find and replace' window, then hit 'Replace all', expecting the job be done in a few seconds. First I thought nothing was happening, but then I realised it was trudging through the file, as if it was wading through waist high molasses. So I closed the results window, and opened another file, but a few seconds later focus switched back to the original file. I tried a couple of times more, but each time it returned to the original window. I watched in morbid fascination for a bit, then decided I would let it go, just to see how long it took. The file contained 500 lines, and was about 80 K. It was taking five seconds to process each line, and eventually finished in about 40 minutes. The problem appeared to be the results processing. I have only looked at the results list about twice, out of idle curiosity, but never saw any thing that I thought could be remotely useful. I would like to be able to turn results logging off altogether, as it wastes real estate (and time!), but this appears to be impossible. On this occasion the program was apparently writing a new line every time it replaced a separator (9 times in each line), and then when it finished processing a line it would erase all the intermediate result lines, and write a new one for the whole line. At the same time it reopened the results window if I had closed it, and return focus to the file being processed. I then wrote a PHP program to read the file, split it, clean up and re-arrange the various elements, enter them into an array in my format, and finally save it as a file my program could handle. After I had got this running on the 500 line file I used it to process the 5000 line file. The whole process was done in the blink of an eye -- literally a fraction of a second. * http://www.briandunning.com/sample-data/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
