Fast and efficient way to read a space separated file of numbers into an array?

Question

I need a fast and efficient method to read a space separated file with numbers into an array. The files are formatted this way:

4 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
2 5 4 3 21111 101         


        

Answer 1

Unless the machine you're parsing these text files on is limited, files of a few hundred MB should still fit in memory. I'd suggest going with your first approach of reading by line and using split.

If memory becomes an issue, your second approach of reading in chunks should work fine.

Basically what I'm saying is just to implement it and measure if performance is a problem.