Reading a File in Chunks

(Jim Mischel) The next problem we have to solve is how to read a text file in memory-sized chunks. In the old days, when all we had to worry about were ASCII strings of one byte per character, we could directly read a large piece of the file into a memory buffer and then scan the buffer, replacing the line terminators with null bytes. Along the way, wed build an index that contained the starting position in the buffer of each line. From there, it was a simple matter to sort the index array.