On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 12:50 +0000, Bayley, Alistair wrote:
From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Duncan Coutts
This can still be done using withFile and hGetContents. You just have to put the consumer inside the scope of withFile. The consumer can work in a streaming fashion. With lazy bytestrings this can be both efficient, work in constant memory and guarantee the file is closed.
We guarantee the file is closed by using withFile. The only thing to watch out for is a consumer that doesn't consume as much as you were expecting before the file does get closed. You should notice that pretty quickly though since it should happen every time (whereas resource leaks are not so immediately visible).
Sure. But this case is the one that typically causes problems for beginners, who have not yet had the educating experience of being bitten by lazy IO. The standard café response to "why do I get <handle closed>" errors here?" is "you're using hGetContents and you haven't forced/consumed all of your file".
This is quite true, but I expect that's easier to explain to beginners than iterator IO, at least at the present time. Duncan