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From: svc@well.UUCP (Leonard Rosenthol)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: String functions in Pascal
Summary: Why not Munger??
Message-ID: <12264@well.UUCP>
Date: 19 Jun 89 02:10:32 GMT
References: <1862@dogie.macc.wisc.edu>
Distribution: usa
Lines: 27

In article <1862@dogie.macc.wisc.edu>, miser@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Dan Miser) writes:
> I'm writing a program that concatanates files.  However, I cannot 
> write and read to the disk in 512 bytes because I need to use readln 
> and writeln (redirected, of course).  I need these because I have to 
> compare string lengths, and check on certain characters inside the 
> string.  But, as you guessed this is too slow.  I've thought of 
> typecasting, but this doesn't want to work.
> 
> So, any ideas how I can write in big blocks while still being able to 
> compare string like functions to the file?
> 
	You are not clear what type of 'string comparision' you need to 
accomplish but assuming it is nothing THAT complex (like grep-type pattern
matching) you might consider using the Munger routine to do the search/compares
for you. (IM I p.468).  Munger is great for doing search/(and optional replace)
in a byte stream (which is what you seem to need to do).  Since munger takes
a handle to a data stream of ANY length, you can read/write in larger chunks
using FSRead/FSWrite.
	If Munger will not handle the searching/comparisons for you, you can
still do large writes by using a buffering scheme and then doing one large
write rather than the smaller ones.

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