Re: complexity for tellg()

From:
John Harrison <john_andronicus@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 20 Feb 2007 07:23:38 GMT
Message-ID:
<_lxCh.8847$fa.3742@newsfe1-win.ntli.net>
toton wrote:

Hi,
  I am reading a big file , and need to have a flag for current file
position so that I can store the positions for later direct access.
 However it looks tellg is a very costly function ! But it's code says
it should just return the current buffer position , thus should be a
very low cost function.
To explain,
{
        boost::progress_timer t;
        std::ifstream in("Y:/Data/workspaces/tob4f/tob4f.dat");
        std::string line;
        while(in){
            int pos = in.tellg();
            std::getline(in,line);
        }
    }
This code takes 0.58 sec in my computer, while if I uncomment the line
in.tellg() , it takes 120.8 sec (varies a little )

can anyone say the reason & the possible workout ?
I amusing MS Visual Studio 7.1 and the std library provided by visual
studio 7.1


The reason is that tellg performs a seek to the current position. This
flushes the input buffer so dramatically slowing down your program.

Looks as through the defintion is streambuf (which is used by all
streams) is such that the only way to find the current position is to
perform a seek to the current position.

john

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