Writing Algorithms That Use the File-Reading Techniques
There are several common ways to organize information in files. The rest of this chapter will show how to apply the various file-reading techniques to these situations and how to develop some algorithms to help with this.
Skipping the Header
Many data files begin with a header. As described in The Readline Technique, TSDL files begin with a one-line description followed by comments in lines beginning with a #, and the Readline technique can be used to skip that header. The technique ends when we read the first real piece of data, which will be the first line after the description that doesn’t start with a #.
In English, we might try this algorithm to process this kind of a file:
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