Thread: General Programming Question!!

Xml is an excellent format for data and settings.

Originally Posted by chottachatri

Another choice is flat file. But that requires parsing and other complex and unmaintainable code. [...] My only doubt is do professional programmers also store data like this only? in some .xml or flat files? or do they store it somewhere else?

It's certainly not unusual for software to use flat files to store data; the only real difference between an .xml file and some other kind of "flat file" of text is that XML would seem slightly more maintainable if other people are involved. But lots of things like configuration files, "address books", browser data, etc are kept in text files that have their own unique format. It seems unlikely such data could be so complex that your method of storing it will end up perplexing someone else later IMO; most likely it will just be the product of one simple function, right? Your compiler certainly does some parsing of varied text files (source code) -- does the compiler's own source count as "complex and unmaintainable"?

Depending on the nature of the data, you could serialize it; this is especially useful if it is already being used by the program as a bunch of objects or in some datatype array. For example (I don't know C#, so I don't know what the equivalent would be), if you have an array of structs like this:

Code:

struct {
    char name[64];
    char data[256];
    int num1;
    int num2;
}

You can write this directly, byte for byte, to a file (as "binary" data, since it will have zero bytes in it and the file need not be readable as text). To load the data, you read it byte for byte back using a function that will put it into structs properly -- eg, up to 64 bytes ending with '\0' into "name", then upto 256 null terminated bytes into "data", then exactly (sizeof(int)) bytes, with no null teminator, into an int. Etc. Do this in a loop and you have a whole array.

That works fine and is pretty straightforward if, like I said, the data is being used someway like that anyhow. Obviously, using pointers in the struct (or object) will complicate that, because there is no point in writing a memory location instead of the data at that memory location!

Originally Posted by pokhara

Code:

WeatherStation station, DateTime predictionDate

can we define the variables in c sharp like this?i am looking through some codes here and while compiling got the error saying"are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference cs0246"
and it is showing error for this variables. I tried to remove it but the program have used the variable name station and predictionDate in the program. So can you help me out?

omg, stop spamming this question in multiple threads.

If no one is answering, it simply means no one knows or no one who has the knowledge is online at the moment!
Posting in several threads is NOT going to help.