Quote:Original post by Icebone1000

Whats the problem on using sscanf if its faster btw?



Actually Im not understanding a crazy situation(at debuging looks fine, everything works as suppose), my app start consumes all my ram(4GB)! also the mouse get slow, and I need to ctrl+alt+del to close it..and that happens loading a file of 229KB! Any idea why this happens? Is this because std::vectors are actually terrible and Im better making the damn wheel that everyone loves to flame...
-___- yes, Im desperate(and my english sucks)

i guess you answered your question yourself..

scanf is very old, very chaotic designed, and definitely not failsafe. tons of ways to use it in a wrong way resulting in memory bugs or crashes.

which is why you should use iostreams instead. and they could actually be faster. why?

iostreams know at COMPILE TIME what types they will read from the file. sscanf has to parse at RUNTIME the scan-string, interpret all the parameters, and based on this, read then those values.

so if done right, iostreams should dance around scanf in performance. and definitely in savety.

i'm not using c++ since years so i can't help you in detail (and especially not with pre-c dated libraries like sscanf). it would be easy to do in .net, though.. :)

and as long as you have your memory leaks, i would not consider the performance important. how much time is it worth spending to just actually getting it working? esp. as you have an already working solution.

maybe (just maybe) maya has an actual parser written to load the files. and that would be much faster even than sscanf.

if it's performance-important, use binary files tailored down to your needs (xna does this, at compilation of your game, it compiles the media data to the fitting binary versions with only the data one needs). that would be even faster than the actual parser that you could write.


but, as you can see, i can't really help you with the problem itself. i just would never touch a function that was written and designed way before any of the actual platforms you can develop on. it's very old (older than you maybe? older than me at least i guess). and as such, very very outdated.

it's unsave in a lot of ways (you have to manually match parsing type and the actual input type you give in / it can read beyond the input string resulting in errors, etc etc..).

i'd stay with the std input version.

another idea could be to actually read the file like you do for sscanf (means the std::getline or what ever you use), and THEN use stringstream to read it in (so instead of ifstream>>bla>>bla>>bla, you'd use stringstream>>bla>>bla>>bla then).

maybe just the pattern in which the file gets accessed defines the performance (hdd's are very slow, which is why i moved to ssds over a year ago).

maybe try that out?



if i look at your original example, it actually looks like you're reading it all twice. first a getline, and then still from the same stream the actual inputting. instead of using the actual data you got from getline.

as said, no c++ guru here anymore..

the simple way would be


no clue what your getline in there actually is for :)


the longer stringstream style way would be sort of like that




all of the reading obviously in a loop.

please show the whole file loading from the moment you open the file to the point where it crashes.

from the unclear snippets you state, i can not help you.