RE: [Haskell-cafe] readFile and closing a file

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Mitchell, Neil wrote:

Hi Henning,

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.