I've been dabbling a a little bit a Java, porting an application that I wrote in VB & C to Linux. However, I'm having a problem. I have one area where I have a loop that is executed a lot. The program is basically a string parser, and the loop is necessary to work through the string. These string come from large files (200 MB and Up), and have a special delimiter. I've created a class to hold my parsing functions, and I'm having no problem getting the desired strings. However, this looping could take as little as 5-10 seconds (for small files) or 10 - 15 minutes. I am looking for a way to free the operating system to perform events (one of those events being a progressbar and status textbox.)

Can someone tell me how Java handles this sort of thing?


--Thanks