Question

I am loading a file into a array in binary form this seems to take a while is there a better faster more efficent way to do this. i am using a similar method for writing back to the file.

procedure openfile(fname:string); var     myfile: file;     filesizevalue,i:integer; begin   assignfile(myfile,fname);   filesizevalue:=GetFileSize(fname); //my method   SetLength(dataarray, filesizevalue);   i:=0;   Reset(myFile, 1);   while not Eof(myFile) do     begin       BlockRead(myfile,dataarray[i], 1);       i:=i+1;     end;   CloseFile(myfile); end; 

Answer 1

You generally shouldn’t read files byte for byte. Use BlockRead with a larger value (512 or 1024 often are best) and use its return value to find out how many bytes were read.

If the size isn’t too large (and your use of SetLength seems to support this), you can also use one BlockRead call reading the complete file at once. So, modifying your approach, this would be:

AssignFile(myfile,fname); filesizevalue := GetFileSize(fname); Reset(myFile, 1); SetLength(dataarray, filesizevalue); BlockRead(myFile, dataarray[0], filesizevalue); CloseFile(myfile); 

Perhaps you could also change the procedure to a boolean function named OpenAndReadFile and return false if the file couldn’t be opened or read.