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From: ADLER1@BRANDEIS.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: YAUU(Yoder's 7/4 gift)
Message-ID: <8707110131.AA27612@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Thu, 9-Jul-87 13:55:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8707110131.AA27612
Posted: Thu Jul  9 13:55:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 14:01:00 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: world
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 37

I just ran my favorite string replacement benchmark on Yoder's belated
4th of July gift to the network and got an error message to the effect
that I must immediately submit an SPR form explaining what I could
possibly have done to bring about this error condition.

I am rather new at VMS and have been largely unsuccessful at getting
it to work the way I would like. One problem is that I don't know
how to control the formatting of files and to guarantee that
records don't get too large. I can't read the documentation
most of the time and sometimes when I have, it has contained
errors that no one here, at least, knows how to get around.

Here's what I did to break Yoder's program: I created a file
called test. which contained the following, more or less:
.......................................................
I then told it to replace every occurrence of a period by
an occurrence of
.........................................................
and that is what produced the error condition.
I'm sure the literati will at once reply, "Of course you
get an error if you do that" and even I can imagine why
I get the error. But I am quite helpless to do anything
about it. How could one modify the program so that it
would automatically create new records when necessary to
handle the overflow caused by string replacement?

I should mention that I got interested in this problem earlier
when I wrote a simple C program to replace every occurrence of
a given character by a given string. It's performance on
VMS has been marred by precisely the same type of problems.
Any suggestions on how to deal with them in case of C will
be especially welcome.

Sincerely,

Allan Adler
ADLER1@BRANDEIS.BITNET