Andrew, In Haskell, lazy I/O is a form of cheating, because Haskell functions are supposed to have no side effects, and lazy I/O is a side effect. At first, cheating seems attractive, but it takes a bit of experience to really understand why cheating really is not a good idea, and that Haskell is so powerful that it doesn't matter that you shouldn't cheat. That has certainly been my experience, and I had to find out the hard way. It sounds like you're starting to see some of the problems with cheating. Here's someone's philosophizing on the subject: http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/it-is-never-safe-to-cheat/ So the short answer is, no - there is no way to force the file returned by readFile to close. I'd recommend using withFile and hGetLine, like this: withFile "testfile" ReadMode $ \h -> do ... l <- hGetLine h If you want more speed, take a look at the stuff in Data.ByteString. If you want proper text encoding and speed, take a look at the 'text' package. Steve On 08/05/10 14:47, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
I'm trying to suss out the best (heh, maybe most idiomatic?) way to handle laziness in a particular file operation. I'm reading a file which contains a list of rss feed items that have been seen previously. I use this list to eliminate feed items I've seen before and thus filter a list of new items. (it's a program to email me feed items from a couple of low frequency feeds).
So, the way I do this is to open the history file with readFile, read it into a list and then use that as a parameter to a filter function. Instead of getting confusing, here is some simple code that gets at the nut of the problem:
import Control.Monad
isNewItem :: [String] -> String -> Bool isNewItem [] = \_ -> True isNewItem ts = \x -> not (any (== x) ts)
filterItems :: [String] -> [String] -> [String] filterItems old is = filter (isNewItem old) is
getOldData :: IO [String] getOldData = catch (liftM lines $ readFile "testfile") (\_ -> return [])
main = do let testData = ["a", "b", "c", "d"] :: [String] currItems <- getOldData let newItems = filterItems currItems $ testData
print newItems -- this is important, it mimics another IO action I'm -- doing in the real code...
appendFile "testfile" . unlines $ newItems
Please ignore, for the moment, whatever *other* problems (idiomatic or just idiotic) that may exist above and focus on the IO problem.
This code works fine *if* the file "testfile" has in it some subset of the testData list. If it has the complete set, it fails with a "resource busy" exception.
Okay, I can more or less understand what's going on here. Each letter in the testData list gets compared to the contents of the file, but because they are *all* found, the readFile call never has to try and fail to read the last line of the file. Thus the file handle is kept open lazily waiting around not having reached EOF. Fair enough.
But what is the best solution? One obvious one, and the one I'm using now, is to move the appendFile call into a function with guards to prevent trying to append an empty list to the end of the file. This solves the problem not by forcing the read on EOF, but by not bothering to open the file for appending:
writeHistory [] = return () writeHistory ni = appendFile "testfile" . unlines $ ni
And this makes some sense. It's silly to try to write nothing to a file.
But it also rubs me the wrong way. It's not solving the problem directly -- closing that file handle. So there's my question, how can I close that thing? Is there some way to force it? Do I need to rework the reading to read one line ahead of whatever I'm testing against (thereby forcing the read of EOF and closing the file)?
thanks
A
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