Data conversion

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: 08 Jan 2003 13:01:05 EST
Ben Boulanger said:

>Read the entire thing into memory (does not scale for
>large files) or iterate over the file twice and just mark the maximum
>length.  Anyone else have a better idea on how to find the max length of
>a field in a CSV file?  

Why do you need to iterate over the file twice?  Can't you just do 
something like:

	$file='foo.csv';
	open (FILE, "$file") or die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
	$longest_field=0;
	$longest_length=0
	while (<FILE>) {

	  @fields=split (/,/,$_);

	  for ($i=0; $i <$#fields; $i++) {
	    $length = length($fields[$i]);
	    if ($length > $longest_length) {
              $longest_field = $i 
	      $longest_length = $length;
	    }
	  }
	}

That way you only iterate over the file once.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
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