I'm writing a loganalysis application and wanted to grab apache log records between two certain dates. Assume that a date is formated as such: 22/Dec/2009:00:19 (day/month/year:hour:minute)
Currently, I'm using a regular expression to replace the month name with its numeric value, remove the separators, so the above date is converted to: 221220090019 making a date comparison trivial.. but..
Running a regex on each record for large files, say, one containing a quarter million records, is extremely costly.. is there any other method not involving regex substitution?
Thanks in advance
Edit: here's the function doing the convertion/comparison
function dateInRange(t, from, to) {
sub(/[[]/, "", t);
split(t, a, "[/:]");
match("JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec", a[2]);
a[2] = sprintf("%02d", (RSTART + 2) / 3);
s = a[3] a[2] a[1] a[4] a[5];
return s >= from && s <= to;
}
"from" and "to" are the intervals in the aforementioned format, and "t" is the raw apache log date/time field (e.g [22/Dec/2009:00:19:36)
