Hello, Benjamin!

Your parser can read file chunks with fixed size. Parser will process these
chunks and update its state.
For instance:
1) read first 512 bytes from the file
2) parse the data with parser, it's state will change (depends on the data
parser is searching for)
3) read another 512 bytes from the file and do step 2

If you're searching for specific constructs in the text you can use regular
expressions for parsing.

To count number of lines, the same approach can be taken:
1) read data chunk
2) scan form newline symbols (\r\n)
3) if found increment newline counter.
--
With best regards, Vadym Stetsiak.
Blog: http://vadmyst.blogspot.com

You wrote  on Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:58:24 +0800:

BFI> anybody who has a better idea on parsing a very large text file
BFI> faster...

BFI> and how to determine the number of lines in a textfile?