Filtering Columnar Data

[Gregory Lypny]

Ahhhh, thanks for the insight, Richard.  The "repeat for each" form  
of the loop control structure is faster than the filter command.  A  
quick test showed that I can cut my time by about 150 milliseconds  
per 800 lines of data.  Considering that I have some 4,000 files with  
thousands of lines per file, it'll make a real difference.

	Greg Lypny

     Associate Professor of Finance
     John Molson School of Business
     Concordia University
     Montreal, Canada


Richard Gaskin responded concisely with the link below my original post:

On 9-Dec-05, at 7:42 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Gregory Lypny wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>>     I use the filter command on tab-delimited text files when I  
>> want to
>> pick off a string in a particular column.  For example, if the string
>> is located in the second column of a five column file, I use
>>
>>     filter theData with "*" & tab & searchString & tab & "*" & tab &
>> "*"  & tab & "*"  .
>>
>> This, I assume, ensures that my hits don't include lines where the
>> string appears in any other column.  It works like lightening when I
>> search in any of the first four columns, but beyond that I get the
>> dreaded spinning beach ball in Mac OS X (Tiger).  Is there a  
>> better way?
>
> <http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2005-July/ 
> 062579.html>