spreadsheet files and binary files

[smercurio_fc]

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Peñata wrote:

Haha wow. My brain really is taking some time to get going. How about 100 instead of 256? I think that should work.

And GerdW, thank you for pointing out the delimiters.

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Is that Hex 100?

Sorry, couldn't resist. 

[ratkindler]

Thanks for everybody's help on this.  I didn't find a good explanation of these differences before.

I was asking about the speed of reading/writing binary files of similar size to text files.  So, depending on the type of data and how it's represented, the file size can be equivalent between text and binary files but would there be any benefit to using binary files in terms of performance in that case?

[smercurio_fc]

It really depends on the amount of data that you're dealing with. You said you're dealing with about 1000 floating point numbers. This is quite small, and you're better off determining which format you'd like to use for ease of use rather than worrying about speed or size issue. Now, if you were dealing with, say, a million or two floating point numbers, then it would be a different story. Saving the data as text file would mean an extra step of converting the text into a float. This can be expensive in terms of CPU time and memory.