On Jan 30, 2008 4:32 AM, Jules Bean
The third, but more sophisticated answer is to use non-blocking IO, read 'only what is available', decide if it's enough to process, if not store it in some local buffer until next time. This is much more work and easy to implement bugs in, but you need it for true streaming protocols. In that case hGetBufNonBlocking is your friend.
If using bytestrings from the network, the network-bytestring package is what you need. If you're parsing small lumps from the network, Data.Binary's failures will probably make life harder than it should be for you since they can only be caught in IO. See http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/DealingWithBinaryData about a strict Get which might work for you. Also, if you want the above approach (read a bit, see if it's enough), see IncrementalGet in the binary-strict package which is a Get with a continuation monad that stops when it runs out of bytes and returns a continuation that you can give more data to in the future. AGL -- Adam Langley agl@imperialviolet.org http://www.imperialviolet.org 650-283-9641