Re: Re: Optimizing existing Perl code (in practise)

[smalhotra]

my $text = `cat $file`;
If you're gonna do that, you might as well do
my $text = join '', <FileHandle->new($file)> and still do it in perl. Frankly I don't know which is faster but I would choose to do it the second way because I think it would be faster.

[Abigail-II]

I'd never choose the second method. With the first, it's immediately clear what it does. With the second, it isn't. And somehow I doubt it's faster - it certainly doesn't look like it, as you first make a list of all the lines, then join them together, meaning you get more than double the memory usage. I'd rather do

    my $text = do {local (@ARGV, $/) = $file; <>};

"Still do it in Perl" isn't a goal, IMO.

Abigail

[IlyaM]

For simple file read/write operation like in this example File::Slurp is the winner:

use File::Slurp;
my $text = read_file($filename);

--
Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)