Re: getting words from file

[Mark Biggar <mark.a.biggar@attbi.com>]

cookie wrote:
> Does anyone know how I would store a word in a specific variable after
> a space occurs inside a textfile? (say there was a line in the
> textfile like this: one two three four five... I'd want it to get
> these words and store it in an already defined var like varOne varTwo
> and so on.
> 
> This is the idea I was playing with to get the actual word (scans
> through the characters until it hits a space and tries to merge all of
> those characters into a word): http://www.guff.org/ada.txt ..or am I
> way off?

First you probably want an array of words not singlton variables.

There are two other main considerations needed for this problem.

The first is that as the words in the file are variable length,
besides the actual characters of each word you will also need to
store its length (or equivalent) somewhere.

The second is related to the first: how are you going to handle a word
that is larger then you expect?

The last time I had to solve a similar problem I didn't store the
words in the variables at all.  I read the whole file into one big
string and then kept an array of records that recorded the start and end
position of each word into that large string.  I then used slicing
to extract the actual characters as needed.

-- 
Mark Biggar
mark.a.biggar@attbi.com