Talk:Reverse the order of lines in a text file while preserving the contents of each line

From Rosetta Code
Revision as of 14:35, 3 August 2021 by Thundergnat (talk | contribs) (Unreasonably vague task description)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Incredibly vague task

Once again, the master of vagarity has struck. Some details need to be hammered out for this to be a task.

  • What is a line?
    • Is it a record that ends with a 0xD character?
    • a 0xA character?
    • a 0xA 0xD digraph?
    • Is there a particular encoding that can be assumed? (ASCII?, EBCDIC?, ISO-Latin-1?, UTF8?)
    • How about binary files?
  • What is to be reversed?
    • Each record in the file?
    • The order of records in a file?
    • Both?
    • What about binary files?
  • What restrictions are there on holding the file in memory?
    • Can it be read in all at once?
    • Does it need to be processed a record at a time?
    • Does it need to be read in starting from the end of the file, proceeding to the beginning?
      • If so, should it be processed in non-record sized blocks?
      • Or a byte / character at a time? (Which circles back around to encoding.)

Every single one of these questions will change the way the program must be written. --Thundergnat (talk) 14:34, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Talk:Reverse_the_order_of_lines_in_a_text_file_while_preserving_the_contents_of_each_line?oldid=314595"