question on reading ascii data from a file.

[address@hidden]

Dear listmembers,
I have a (probably ...) simple question. When reading data from a file (say, 
two columns of numbers), the fastest way to access the data to do a

infile=fopen("name", "r");
data=fscanf(infile, "%f %f");
fclose(infile);

however, doing this you cannot cope with lines having a different shape and / 
or being comments. To circumvent this problem, I started reading line by line, 
removing whitespace from the front of the line and check wheter the first non 
whitespace  character of the line is a %, a ;, a # or a similar character. This 
actually works, however, it is very slow.

Does someone of you probably have an idea how to handle this (improve speed)?

Thank you very much in advance, 
take care




Dieter Jurzitza