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Hi all,

Say I was to use MAKE MEMBLOCK FROM FILE to suck in the contents of a fairly small text file, store it, and then bounce around it for a bit.

What do I mean by "bounce around"? I'd like to be able to read strings out of it as if I were using the READ STRING command with a normal OPEN TO READ operation, however, the difference is, I'd like to be able to move the read cursor back to the start of the memblock again.

So basically, I want to start reading strings out of the memblock from the beginning to the end, but at any point jump back to the start again and repeat the process.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I would do this?

Write some pre processing code that step through the source text file and work out the offsets of the strings in the raw output data. So the output data has a header containing the number of strings say, followed by a list of (32bit) offsets to the first character of the string in the data heap. Depending upon the language you could store the size of the string at this offset followed by the raw characters, or store it null terminated.. Bellow i've assume they'd be null terminated..


Here's how such a structure might when it cotains 2 strings.


When converting the text data you can have it removed duplicates for example. Or token the text and store them as list of tokens, but that's a bit more stuffing around with the data up front. You ould do the string operations in memblocks also, as DBpro string oeprations aren't that quick.

Thanks, Kevin!