Re: map-file-lines

[joakim@verona.se]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:54:30 -0500 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: 
>
>>> Emacs Lisp lacks a good way to iterate over all the lines of a file,
>>> especially for a large file.
>
> SM> I'm not really happy about focusing on "line at a time".  It's a useful
> SM> and common case, but Emacs usually is pretty good about being "line
> SM> agnostic" (font-lock being an obvious counter example).
>
> SM> Providing some kind of stream-processing functionality might be good,
> SM> tho the need doesn't seem terribly high, since we've managed to avoid it
> SM> until now.
>
> Without this function, Emacs simply can't handle large files and that's
> been requested at least 4 times by users that I can recall.  I think a
> general solution to the large file Emacs problem would be better, but
> line-oriented processing is a classic approach to processing large files
> that many Emacs users will probably find familiar.
>
> SM> FWIW, another option is to provide an open-file-stream along the same
> SM> lines as open-network-stream.  I.e. the chunks are received via
> SM> a process filter.
>
> How is that better than insert-file-contents as I use it?  Are you
> thinking of a stateful back/forward seek capability?  Or do you mean
> you'd like it to be asynchronous?

I would like to add my voice in requesting "large file" capability in
Emacs. I wanted it many times over the years, but always coped-out into
some other editor for this.

A common example is hex-editing a large binary file, or finding some
text in some enourmous log-file.


>
> Ted
>
>
-- 
Joakim Verona