Kevin, You are on the right track. Increasing the number of characters per READ is by far the most significant thing you can do to speed up your routine. Reading one character at a time using a star-Read is very slow. Each M implementation has a way to do binary reads -- ie, a read which does not look for a terminator and does not translate any characters (like HT into spaces), but the M Standard does not specify this level of detail -- it's left to the implementer.
I don't know whether VistA provides a way to call a file Open that provides the necessary parameters for this. Others on this list will. Most M's do not have a problem storing binary data strings in globals. (I know of only one that uses null-terminated strings, and to my knowledge, it has never been used for VistA.) WHY do this at all? It seems like the long-way around. Normally, when a file is the object of interest, one just points to it by name and lets the underlaying OS and utilities handle it. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kevin Toppenberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Hardhats Sourceforge" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2005 8:46 AM Subject: [Hardhats-members] more M read questions > The read command in M seems to be the most complicated function it has. > > I am trying to perform a binary read. I do it this way: > > read blockIn#255 > > The problem is that as I debug the code, $length(blockIn) does not always=255. > > I think this is because sometimes the stream contains a "terminator", > such as a #13 etc. > > How do do a read that ignores the usual "terminators"? > > Thanks > Kevin > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO > September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices > Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA > Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf > _______________________________________________ > Hardhats-members mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members > ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
