Re: Binary v. Text, why is it faster?

Arctic Fidelity wrote:
I have constantly seen and heard that reading binary data is faster than reading textual data. I have always presumed this to be a fact. But now I am at the point where I would like to understand why.

Text files have line end characters, and these differ under different OSes (Ascii 12,13 or 12+13 ...). The io-library usually searches the eol in every line processed, even if you try to read/write a larger chunk of data. "Large" might mean the quantity transferred in the access time of the disk (10 ms @ 50 MB/s =500 kBytes).
hth
Klaus

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