Re: massive search and replace failures

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

A couple of specific examples would help: Your exact
CHAnge command, the text the should have been changed,
but wasn't, etc. And when you say "massive", how big are
these files?

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/

> I'm using XyWrite 4 for DOS to post-process data dumps from MS Access tables
> into XML files. The biggest part of the job involves translating what were
> ANSI-accented characters in Windows (but viewed, of course, as ASCII in DOS)
> to the corresponding ISO entities ("é" etc). To compound matters,
> these conversions are being performed only within cdata tags
> () and not on the rest of the data in the XML files (these
> ANSI-accents are being stripped to plain lower-128 ASCII). So my routines
> are defining blocks and running sequences of cha/s search and replace
> operations.
>
> They seem to be 99% effective, but every once in a while they skip a
> character that should have been translated, usually after another character
> has been translated within the same defined block. Has anyone else
> experienced similar hickups on massive search and replace sequences? Is
> there a known cure?
>
> I have a parser that detects the misses in the XML files, so I can fix them,
> but the repairs are slowing me down. I'm dealing with big files, too, and
> the error rate seems to increase toward the end: should I be making the
> files smaller? (I remember XyWrite 3 used to have problems when files
> exceeded a certain size, but I thought XyWrite 4 fixed that.) To speed
> processing, I reduced df wa to 1; is that too low?
>
> --Chuck Creesy
> Princeton University Press
>