Re: Faster file read, text search and replace

[Jenda]

It's Perl (the language) or perl (the "interpreter"), not PERL. And no, there's nothing on the Perl side that can make this quicker. The IO costs will greatly overweight anything you can do on the Perl side. The data should not be in the XML format. It's one of the least space efficient ways to store data and when reading and writing is involved, space equals speed.

If you can't change the way you store the data, you might at least store it compressed and then decompress as you read and compress as you write. While it will mean more work for the CPU, the IO costs ought to be much lower. See PerlIO::gzip and PerlIO::via::Bzip2.

Also ... making changes to a XML file without the use of a module that actually understands the format is dangerous. Sooner or later you run into problems with encoding, entities or comments. I'm not saying you may never ever do it ... if it's a one time transformation of a known XML and the changes are simple enough, go ahead ... but do be careful.