Is there a fast way to parse through a large file with regex?
algorithm, c#, regex
Solution
Memory Mapped Files and Task Parallel Library for help.
- Create persisted MMF with multiple random access views. Each view corresponds to a particular part of a file
- Define parsing method with parameter like `IEnumerable<string>`, basically to abstract a set of not parsed lines
- Create and start one TPL task per one MMF view with `Parse(IEnumerable<string>)` as a Task action
- Each of worker tasks adds a parsed data into the shared queue of BlockingCollection type
- An other Task listen to BC (GetConsumingEnumerable()) and processes all data which already parsed by worker Tasks
See Pipelines pattern on MSDN
Must say this solution is for `.NET Framework >=4`
Problem
Problem: Very very, large file I need to parse line by line to get 3 values from each line. Everything works but it takes a long time to parse through the whole file. Is it possible to do this within seconds? Typical time its taking is between 1 minute and 2 minutes. Example file size is 148,208KB I am using regex to parse through every line: Here is my c# code: ``` private static void ReadTheLines(int max, Responder rp, string inputFile) { List<int> rate = new List<int>(); double counter = 1; try { using (var sr = new StreamReader(inputFile, Encoding.UTF8, true, 1024)) { string line; Console.WriteLine("Reading...."); while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null) { if (counter <= max) { counter++; rate = rp.GetRateLine(line); } else if (max == 0) { counter++; rate = rp.GetRateLine(line); } } rp.GetRate(rate); Console.ReadLine(); } } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine("The file could not be read:"); Console.WriteLine(e.Message); } } ``` Here is my regex: ``` public List<int> GetRateLine(string justALine) { const string reg = @"^\d{1,}.+\[(.*)\s[\-]\d{1,}].+GET.*HTTP.*\d{3}[\s](\d{1,})[\s](\d{1,})$"; Match match = Regex.Match(justALine, reg, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); // Here we check the Match instance. if (match.Success) { // Finally, we get the Group value and display it. string theRate = match.Groups[3].Value; Ratestorage.Add(Convert.ToInt32(theRate)); } else { Ratestorage.Add(0); } return Ratestorage; } ``` Here is an example line to parse, usually around 200,000 lines: 10.10.10.10 - - [27/Nov/2002:16:46:20 -0500] "GET /solr/ HTTP/1.1" 200 4926 789