On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 05:38:51PM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Mitchell, Neil wrote:
I tend to use openFile, hGetContents, hClose - your initial readFile like call should be openFile/hGetContents, which gives you a lazy stream, and on a parse error call hClose.
Yes, this seems to be the right way. This weakness should be mentioned in the docs of readFile. In production code, you cannot rely on a garbage collector to close the file, because you might want to open a file for writing after you have processed it with readFile, and there is warranty that the file is already closed then.
Ah, so you must be concerned about windows systems? Yes, on windows systems it's definitely best to never to lazy IO. On non-windows file systems, unless you're planning on opening thousands of files, relying on the garbage collector is fine. David