But writing it would be harder, no? I mean if it's only like 50 short lines, that would be okay-ish, but in this case why do it in C and not use perl or awk?(i

But writing it would be harder, no? I mean if it's only like 50 short lines, that would be okay-ish, but in this case why do it in C and not use perl or awk?(i suppose you want fast text processing, so I won't suggest python). If the processing is hard, then you will need debugging (which is better in segregated functions) and to prototype a bit (unless I'm the only one who does that?).