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does fortran have a maximum ‘string’ length?
i am going to be reading lines from a file which could have very long lines. the one i am looking at now has around 1.3k characters per line, but it is possible that they may have much more. i am reading each line from the file to a character*5000 variable, but if i get more in the future, is it bad to make it a character*5000000 variable? is there a max? is there a better way to solve this problem than making a very large character variables?
Since the usual Fortran IO is record based, reading lines into strings implies knowing the maximum string length. Another possible design: use stream IO and Fortran will ignore the record boundaries. Read the file in fixed-length chunks that are shorter than the longest lines. The complication is handling items split across chunk boundaries. The practicality depends on details not given in the question.
P.S. From “The Fortran 2003 Handbook” by Adams et al.: “The maximum length permitted for character strings is processor-dependent.” — meaning compiler dependent.