Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!wuarchive!decwrl!shelby!portia!gaia
From: gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Various Turbo pascal questions
Keywords: Turbo pascal
Message-ID: <6983@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 25 Nov 89 08:35:13 GMT
References: <2185@leah.Albany.Edu> <6972@portia.Stanford.EDU> <4269@pegasus.ATT.COM>
Sender: fai to leung <gaia@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 41

In article <4269@pegasus.ATT.COM> psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes:
>> In article <2185@leah.Albany.Edu> ppd491@leah.Albany.Edu (Peter P. Donohue) writes:
>> 1) In an external data file (containing all ascii data), what is the
>> maximum length of a line allowed? 
>
>In article <1989Nov23.183325.4549@uwasa.fi>, ts@uwasa.fi (Timo Salmi LASK) writes:
>> If you use ordinary strings the maximum is only 255 characters.
>> You can make it as long as 64K allows by adapting 
>>   var line : array [maxlengt] of char;
>> There are some good "LongString" routines in O'Brien, Turbo Pascal,
>> the Complete Reference.
>
>In article <6972@portia.Stanford.EDU>, gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung) writes:
>> I would say 255 characters long.
>> Pascal strings format are byte[0]=length of string follow by the ascii chars.
>
>Yes, if you try to read the whole line in at once.  If you read() each
>character one at a time, and don't need the whole line in memory at the
>same time, is there a limit?  (I would hope not, but TP might do some
>internal buffering.)  Peter, you might try this yourself.

Of course any file can be assessed in a byte stream style.
A text in TP is a special file.

A simple type of

TYPE
  BIGGGGG_STRING = record size:ORD_TYPE; DATA:Maxsize_can_handle; end;

will give a good size "string", (>=64K?)
and you don't byte read, but

assign(file_type,name_string_of_file);
reset(file_type,sizeof(BIGGGGG_STRING));

then read it in by

blockread(file_type,BIGGGGG_STRING_buffer,1);

or the whole thing changing "1".

so much for TP