Read a defined block from text file

Hello,

I like to read text from a text file with following structure:

Random Text 
over several 
lines
item( 
   name="Item1", 
   note="Note1", 
   coef=( 
      DATA(1, 2, 3, [11, 12, 21, 22]),
      DATA(4, 5, 6, [44, 45, 54, 55])
   ),
   author="Name1"
 )
item( 
   name="Item2", 
   note="Note2", 
   coef=( 
      DATA(1, 2, 3, [11, 12, 21, 22]),
      DATA(4, 5, 6, [44, 45, 54, 55])
   ),
   author="Name2"
 )
 ...

The structure is always the same (sometimes author is missing; DATA with 3 numbers and a vector is always stored in item). I thought I can use something like fscanf(fileID,'item(%s)') and split the text again. However, this does not work (returns an empty string).

The file is very big; looping through with fgetl and using if and strcmp works, but is very slow.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Maybe try to read the whole file into one array with fread() and then do your parsing on the array. It should be faster than a bunch of disk accesses.