Michael, It's probably a good idea to send questions like this to the Poly/ML mailing list and I'm copying this reply to the list. There are people on the list who may have experience of what you're trying to do and also any replies get archived and reduce the chances of the same question being asked repeatedly.
To reply to your specific question: there's no difference in efficiency between TextIO and BinIO on Unix. On Windows TextIO is more complicated because of the need to convert between CRLF and "\n". I'm not clear how you are accessing the file, whether it is random or sequential. To read individual bytes you can always use BinIO.input1 or TextIO.input1. This would save you having to explode a vector.
BinIO deals with values of type Word8.word and the vector is Word8Vector.vector. These are unsigned byte values.
Regards, David
On 16/10/2012 20:59, Michael Moeller wrote:
Hi,
I've got a problem regarding huge files as input. I need to get access to the single byteslike with fgetc() in C. TextIO and subsequently exploding the string does the jobbut performance matters and it seems to me like BinIOsaves me from the 'explode' step.Unfortunately I can't figure out how to access theresulting BinIO.vector. I'd be appreciative to seean exampleand please tell me if this is not the right approach.
Regards, Michael