Using Foxpro to query line lengths

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I was reviewing some code changes, and I noticed some of the lines were quite different in length.

I wrote some code to figure out why. I thought initially that I would just create a cursor with a field of length 250 and then use the APPEND FROM …SDF command to put the entire file into a cursor. However, I realized that wouldn’t work because one of the lines was several thousand characters long. So I thought I’d had to use the low level file functions, such as FREAD(). I also thought about appending the entire file into a memo field using the APPEND MEMO command

Then I remembered the ALINES function which served the job quite nicely. I just wanted to show the longest line lengths before and after modifications.

cPath="d:\public\files\"

SET ALTERNATE TO t.txt

SET ALTERNATE on

 

ShowLens(cPath+"Samples.cpp")

ShowLens(cPath+"Samples2.cpp")

SET ALTERNATE to

_cliptext=FILETOSTR("t.txt")

PROCEDURE ShowLens(cFile as String)

      cStr=FILETOSTR(cFile)

      n=ALINES(aa,cStr)

      CREATE CURSOR lengths (Line i, len i)

      FOR i = 1 TO n

            INSERT INTO lengths VALUES (i,LEN(aa[i]))

      ENDFOR

      SELECT TOP 10 line,len FROM lengths ORDER BY 2 DESC INTO CURSOR result

      ?JUSTFNAME(cFile), "total lines = ",n

      LIST off

 

RETURN