What is the fastest way to Parse a line in Delphi?

Question

I have a huge file that I must parse line by line. Speed is of the essence.

Example of a line:

Token-1   Here-is-the-Next-Token      La         


        

Answer 1

The fastest way to write the code would probably be to create a TStringList and assign each line in your text file to the CommaText property. By default, white space is a delimiter, so you will get one StringList item per token.

MyStringList.CommaText := s;
for i := 0 to MyStringList.Count - 1 do
begin
  // process each token here
end;

You'll probably get better performance by parsing each line yourself, though.