The Easy and Efficient Way to Read Text Files from the IFS

摘要

Over the last several years, I've written quite a bit of material about processing IFS files from an RPG program. Most of that material demonstrates using the open() and read() APIs to read text from an IFS file. This technique works great for many IFS files, but it can be awkward when you're processing a text file. A text file is a file in which the records aren't always the same length. Instead of fixed-length records being read, each record ends when the carriage return and line-feed (CRLF) characters are found. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well with the open() and read() APIs, because reading a file one character at a time is not very efficient! Here, I demonstrate a different API that makes reading text file records easy without sacrificing efficiency.