Re: [Haskell-cafe] data.binary get reading beyond end of input bytestring?

On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 19:01 +0900, Conrad Parker wrote:

On 29 July 2010 17:46, Duncan Coutts wrote:

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On 29 July 2010 07:53, Conrad Parker wrote:

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Something smells fishy here. I have a hard time believing that binary is reading more input than is available? Could you post more code please?

The issue seems to just be the return value for "bytes consumed" from getLazyByteString. Here's a small example.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary/0.5.0.2/doc/html/Data-Bin...

getLazyByteString :: Int64 -> Get ByteString An efficient get method for lazy ByteStrings. Does not fail if fewer than n bytes are left in the input.

Because it does it lazily it cannot check if it's gone past the end of the input. Arguably this is crazy and the function should not exist.

cheers Duncan, that confirms my guess about the reason. Would you accept a patch quoting you on that last point to the comment? ;-)

The consensus plan amongst the binary hackers is to eliminate lazy lookahead functions and to rebuild binary on top of a continuation style using strict chunks (then with lazy decoding built on top). Duncan