Hey all,

I'm making a few programs that do some regex work with files.

Currently, the program loops through an array created by readlines(). Then, it "regexes" each line. The problem is, this wont catch the pattern I'm searching for if it spans multiple lines. (Example: I'm searching for "cows" but the file contains co\nws).
One solution would be to read the ENTIRE file into memory, but that could eat up resources on a large scale. Does anyone have an idea for performing "cross-lines regex" without memory problems?

Thanks a bunch,
StalePretzel

Is the file formatted in such a way that you can read in a group of arbitrary lines, e.g. like a paragraph at a time? That way you don't have to read the whole file but you will still ensure all line spans are caught.

Alternatively you could just load into memory a set amount of data, e.g. 15KB, which will ensure you don't exceed your memory requirements. I don't know if this may lead to a missed span but it may worth a try.

Well you could always read the file with the read() method (which takes a size in bytes as an argument, and returns that information as a string) to get a whole "paragraph", and then apply the regex changes to another file.

But seriously, most computers today have enough memory to read very big files, those have to be quite heavy if you doubt on editing them as a whole.

regards

(six months later...)