Thanks for responding. Unfortunately, the data already exists. I have no way
of instituting limitations on the format, much less reformatting it to suit my
needs. It is true that I can make some general assumptions about the data
(unrealistically long strings are unlikely to occur), but I can't write a
steadfastly robust reader under such assumptions.
The problem is that even if I impose an assumption of limited length strings,
that doesn't prescribe a method for handling the possibility of an error. If a
string really is too long and the reader fails to detect it, I'm not sure how
to insure that the reader or subsequent map task fails in a clean fashion.
If I could at least impose an assumption of this sort...and then detect and
fail cleanly on violations of the assumption, that would go a long way.
I'll think about it.
Thanks.
On Feb 22, 2012, at 14:59 , Steve Lewis wrote:
> It sounds like you may need to give up a little to make things work -
> Suppose, for example, that you placed a limit on the length of a quoted
> string,
> say 1024 characters - the reader can then either start at the beginning or
> read back by, say 1024 characters to see if the start is in a quote and
> proceed accordingly - it quoted strings can be of arbitrary length there may
> be no good solution
________________________________________________________________________________
Keith Wiley kwi...@keithwiley.com keithwiley.com music.keithwiley.com
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with
sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-- Galileo Galilei
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