comment on

Considering the size of the file, nothing will be fast, however, unless you need to do lots of searches, there is no need to sort the file. You are only interested in the lines that match you search term.

If you don't have many searches to do, then the approach I would take would be to filter the file using unix tools to get the lines of interest. eg:

grep 'text2' <filename>

This will give you the lines containing the data you want in linear time. From there you easily turn it into a perl array.

If you need to do lots of searches, then you will need to consturct an index of some sort, or ingest the whole thing into a database, and let the database engine worry about the index.

In reply to Re: search a large text file by chrestomanci
in thread search a large text file by perl_lover_always

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Do you know where your variables are?
	PerlMonks