Efficient Text File parser

[Jack Higgins]

Hi,

I was wondering if I could get some advice on the most efficient way I can parse a text file which contains the following pair:

<String LABEL:> Paragraph

For example:

PAGENUMBER: 1
TEXT: text with multiple lines
TEXT: some more text
PAGENUMBER: 2 TEXT: random te:xt here with colon just to add some spice
PAGENUMBER: 3

I was wondering what might be the best way to do this: I could tokenize on ":" but only if it matches with a specific label like TEXT or PAGENUMBER.

Thank you for your help,
Jack Higgins.

[keang]

I was wondering if I could get some advice on the most efficient way I can parse a text file which contains the following pair

That all depends what you mean by "most efficient".

I was wondering what might be the best way to do this:

If you know for sure that the label is at the beginning of the line and is always followed by a colon then read in the file a line at a time and for each line either use a regex to split the line or call the string's indexOf(':') method to find the index of the first colon and then use the substring() method to split the string at this index.

[Jack Higgins]

Thanks Keang.

I guess the problem is that the label with the colon might not always be on a new line.


Jack.

[keang]

You need to have some way of identifying the label or the task is impossible.
If the label is not necessarily at the beginning of a line then what is the identification criteria?