Re: [MacPerl-AnyPerl] Regular Expression Problem

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

At 18:11 -0400 4/29/1999, Chris Nandor wrote:
>He said it was all on one line.  :p  And I don't think the performance hit
>with the non-greedy would be much greater than the extra time it takes to
>write the extra characters for the character class, much less comment on
>it.  :D

That's correct- this is a HarperCollins dictionary that was 
originally published in Quark, then exported using a Quark->HTML 
Xtension. In cleaning up the export file, I elected to strip all of 
the line endings within individual entries, so that everything 
pertaining to a given entry is on one physical line. This works very 
well with Search::Dict and queries are returned more or less 
instantly. I've previously tried using odd ascii as stop characters 
for retrieving chunks of text from a file, but thought that using 
single lines was a better approach for this particular file.

An interesting side effect is that it took 3 days to clean up this 
file in BBEdit, largely because of out of memory problems as the 
Undos began to accumulate. Also, this is an odd kind of dictionary 
since biblical scholars apparently like to talk a lot and some of the 
entries go on for 20 Quark pages. I've found that altho BBEdit will 
grudgingly put up with this, neither vi nor pico will even open the 
file without truncating lines. I've asked my client to put GNU Emacs 
on the Solaris server so that the file can be edited locally.

Finally, I did try to get the script to run on my Mac by using a line 
by line read instead of slurping in the whole file and this also 
crapped out tho I gave MacPerl 50 megs of memory. It's not the first 
time I've come across memory related problems trying to do Perl 
things on a Mac that disappear entirely once I migrate them to 
Solaris, especially cgi. At the moment, I don't consider that so much 
an indictment of MacOS as a tribute to Solaris, but I am hoping that 
OS X will provide some degree of equality that just isn't there right 
now.


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto://maccgi@bellsouth.net
770.565.8267

==== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
==== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-anyperl-request@macperl.org