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Asked: 2026-06-13T20:50:10+00:00

I’m now going to manipulate large files in Ruby. What I’m going to do

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I’m now going to manipulate large files in Ruby.

What I’m going to do is to add a header line to a gigabyte size file containing a sequence of characters with no new-lines and output the result to a new file. (shown below in example). There can be one of four characters at each position in the sequence (a, c, g, t)

My questions are

  1. Should I open gigabyte size file & ouput file whether as Binary or as Text file?

  2. I’d like to know a sample code. (If possible, I don’t want to load all the data of giga-byte size file at once on memory of my computer.)

Thanks.

Example
Suppose the program name is add-header-giga (The 1st argument is header-line and the 2nd argument specifies the input file name. Output file name is output-file)

>cat giga-byte-size-file.txt
cctgcaggagcagagcaaagaggtggccatccgcatctttcgggctgccagtttcgctcctggaggctgtgcag....


>add-header-giga DNA-sequence-from-Homo-Sapiens  giga-byte-size-file.txt


>cat output-file
DNA-sequence-from-Homo-Sapiens
cctgcaggagcagagcaaagaggtggccatccgcatctttcgggctgccagtttcgctcctggaggctgtgcag....
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If there’s no newlines then it doesn’t matter. Binary vs text only differs in their treatment of newlines.

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