Text Files or binaries with objects?

Hi.

I have some large text files that I need to repeatedly analyse. I can easily
parse the strings and load the data into my custom object ready to be
analysed, but the parsing has to take time, and I have a large number of
these text files to analyse.

Wouldn't it be more efficient, given that I will be re-analysing each text
file many times over many sessions, to parse the text files once, then save
my list of objects as a binary file, effectively avoiding the need to
repeatedly parse strings? I imagine it would, but I'm not sure how to do it.
At the moment I am using a TStringList to store the custom objects, but it
appears the SaveToFile method only saves the strings, not the objects
associated with them. If I use some SaveToStream cose, how do I decode the
stream when it come back?

The objects I use are really just records at the moment, with several
properties of type 'Single', and one 'TDateTime' property. I have used an
object type just in case I need to add methods etc that I haven't
anticipated.

thanks in advance for any hints or pointers.

Paul.


.

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