A month ago, I downloaded a large dataset from Twitter. The .txt file consisted of around 1.5 million tweets in JSON and weighed at 5.5 GB. I wanted to look at the structure of the JSON in order to design a parser for processing the tweets. I was then working on a Sentiment Analysis project. As I attempted to open the file in Sublime Text 2, my powerful Mac just gave up.
Not so powerful after all. Well, Sublime Text 2 wasn’t designed to handle large files, nor is TextEdit or Text Wrangler. I looked around the web-o-sphere and found HexFiend. I tell ya, it was a great ‘find’. HexFiend is able to handle files as large as >100 GB. That’s a lot of data. As soon as I downloaded HexFiend, my text file just took 1 second to open. I was in complete awe. There it was, I was staring at 1.5 million tweets right in front of me.
You can tap into the power of HexFiend, too. Just click here.
About Ali Gajani
Hi. I am Ali Gajani. I started Mr. Geek in early 2012 as a result of my growing enthusiasm and passion for technology. I love sharing my knowledge and helping out the community by creating useful, engaging and compelling content. If you want to write for Mr. Geek, just PM me on my Facebook profile.
