[gambit-list] fast csv parser (libcsv wrapped for gambit)

Phil Dawes pdawes at users.sf.net
Tue Feb 13 10:03:38 EST 2007


Lang Martin wrote:
>
> The overhead is related to multi-byte characters being recognized by  
> read-char, and the buzz reports that other systems incur similar  
> overhead to handle utf-8. There was a comparison to python (and maybe  
> perl as well) on a blog somewhere.
> 

I had a look at this a while back (comparing the python, my previous 
favourite language).
https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/2006-September/000815.html
Basically it appears that python stores strings as byte-array + char 
encoding meta. If the output is the same char encoding as the input then 
it never gets translated - hence the speed.

l = file("bib").read()   # takes 9ms in python (4.3M file)

- thats basically the same speed as a C fread() on my laptop.

Cheers,

Phil



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