fast opening/searching of files and ereg

[Anon]

Hello All,

I have a file that is in binary format and I need to search it for a specific group of ascii codes. How can I do this with regular expressions in php?

I have tried various methods, but they are slow. What is my best method for searching (and extracting info from) potentially large files?

Here is the code I am using (which works, but it takes 5 seconds to run on a 400k file - many files will be 3 MB or more):

$searchValue = chr(43) . chr(39) . chr(179). chr(217) . chr(48);
$theFile = "c:/reports/employee.dcr";
$handle = fopen($theFile,"r");
while(! feof($handle))
{
$theChar = fgetc($handle);
$contents .= $theChar;
}
fclose($handle);
$p = strpos($contents,$searchValue);
print "FOUND: $p at " . date("hⓂs") . "<br>";

Thanks for the help!
Scott

[Anon]

first of all, avoid the while loop by using fread() to whack the whole binary into a string.

unfortunately, regexes are not really well suited for finding the position of matches. i'm afraid you may have to stick with strpos (unless someone else comes up with something clever), although you could make matter somewhat faster by using octal escapes to form the search string.

--
rad

[Anon]

Thanks!

Using fread(), I opened the file and the time was cut from 5 seconds to 1 second! I opened a 2.3 MB file and the time was cut to 1 second for it as well!

Scott