Efficient Reading of Input File - io

Question

Currently for a task, I am working with input files which give Matrix related test cases (Matrix Multiplication) i.e., example of an input file ->
N M
1 3 5 ... 6 (M columns)
....
5 4 2 ... 1 (N rows)
I was using simple read() to access them till now, but this is not efficient for large files of size > 10^2.
So I wanted to know is there some way to use processes to do this in parallel.
Also I was thinking of using multiple IO readers based on line, so then each process could read different segments of the file but couldn't find any helpful resources.
Thank you.
PS: Current code is using this:
io:fread(IoDev, "", "~d")

Answer 1

Did you consider to use re module? I did not make a performance test, but it may be efficient. In the following example I do not use the first "M N" line. So I did not put it in the matrix.txt file.
matrix file:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
I made the conversion in the shell
1> {ok,B} = file:read_file("matrix.txt"). % read the complete file and store it in a binary
{ok,<<"1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9\r\n11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19\r\n21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29\r\n31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39">>}
2> {ok,ML} = re:compile("[\r\n]+"). % to split the complete binary in a list a binary, one for each line
{ok,{re_pattern,0,0,0,
<<69,82,67,80,105,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,8,0,0,255,255,255,255,
255,255,...>>}}
3> {ok,MN} = re:compile("[ ]+"). % to split the line into binaries one for each integer
{ok,{re_pattern,0,0,0,
<<69,82,67,80,73,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,17,0,0,0,255,255,255,255,
255,255,...>>}}
4> % a function to split a line and convert each chunk into integer
4> F = fun(Line) -> Nums = re:split(Line,MN), [binary_to_integer(N) || N <- Nums] end.
#Fun<erl_eval.7.126501267>
5> Lines = re:split(B,ML). % split the file into lines
[<<"1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9">>,<<"11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19">>,
<<"21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29">>,
<<"31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39">>]
6> lists:map(F,Lines). % map the function to each lines
[[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9],
[11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19],
[21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29],
[31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39]]
7>
if you want to check the matrix size, you can replace the last line with:
[[NbRows,NbCols]|Matrix] = lists:map(F,Lines),
case (length(Matrix) == NbRows) andalso
lists:foldl(fun(X,Acc) -> Acc andalso (length(X) == NbCols) end,true,Matrix) of
true -> {ok,Matrix};
_ -> {error_size,Matrix}
end.

Answer 2

is there some way to use processes to do this in parallel.
Of course.
Also I was thinking of using multiple IO readers based on line, so
then each process could read different segments of the file but
couldn't find any helpful resources.
You don't seek to positions in a file by line, rather you seek to byte positions. While a file may look like a bunch of lines, a file is actually just one long sequence of characters. Therefore, you will need to figure out what byte positions you want to seek to in the file.
Check out file:position, file:pread.