Scanning a file

[David Rasmussen]

netvaibhav at gmail.com wrote:
> I think implementing a finite state automaton would be a good (best?)
> solution. I have drawn a FSM for you (try viewing the following in
> fixed width font). Just increment the count when you reach state 5.
> 
>                     <---------------|
>                    |                |
>         0      0   |  1      0      |0
>  -->[1]--->[2]--->[3]--->[4]--->[5]-|
>      ^ |    |      ^ |     |      |
>     1| |<---|      | |     |1     |1
>      |_|    1      |_|     |      |
>      ^             0       |      |
>      |---------------------|<-----|
> 
> If you don't understand FSM's, try getting a book on computational
> theory (the book by Hopcroft & Ullman is great.)
> 

I already have that book. The above solution very slow in practice. None 
of the solutions presented in this thread is nearly as fast as the

print file("filename", "rb").read().count("\x00\x00\x01\x00")

/David