Re: Reading data from a file descriptor

[Jan Synáček]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Jan Synáček <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 12:49 AM, Andreas Rottmann <address@hidden>
> > wrote:
> >
> >     Also note that if there's no requirement to actually implement
> >     this in
> >     C, there's `fdes->inport' and `fdes->outport' on the Scheme level,
> >     so
> >     something like the following would be analogous to the C example
> >     code
> >     posted:
> >
> >     (import (ice-9 binary-ports))
> >
> >     (define (process-fd fd)
> >     (let ((port (fdes->inport fd)))
> >     (display "read: ")
> >     (display (get-bytevector-n port 100))
> >     (display "\n")))
> >
> >     (process-fd (acquire-valid-fd))
> >
> >
> > This is something very similar that I ended up with. Just instead of
> > get-byte-vector, I used read-string!/partial.
>
> I would advise against using 'read-string!/partial' or any of the
> procedures in (ice-9 rw).  This is a vestigial module from Guile 1.8
> when strings were arrays of bytes, which they no longer are.  We should
> probably mark them as deprecated.
>
> For one thing, when we switch to using UTF-8 as the internal string
> encoding, it will not be possible to keep 'read-string!/partial'
> efficient.  It will necessarily have to do an encoding conversion.
>
> In Guile 2+, I would advise using byte vectors when working with binary
> data.  Portions of these can be converted to strings with a given
> encoding if desired.  I might be able to give better advice if I knew
> more about what you are doing here.
>
>     Regards,
>       Mark


I have an open fd to a unix socket and I want to read data from it. I
know that the data is going to be only strings, but I don't know the
length in advance. The good thing about using read-string!/partial is,
that I don't have to specify how many bytes I want to read and it does
the right thing. If you point me to a better direction, I'll be
grateful. I came up with:

(for-each (lambda (fd)
            (let* ((buf (make-string 4096)))
              (read-string!/partial buf (fdes->inport fd))
              (format #t "fd[~a]: ~a" fd buf) (newline)))
          fds)

-- 
Jan Synáček