On Wednesday 30 January 2008 13:51:58 you wrote:
Okay, but then I have to make sure that my strings won't contain any newline characters, right? If this is the case, another question raises up: I am using Data.Binary to do the serialization of my data structures to ByteString, so does anybody know if this makes guarantees about newline characters in the resulting ByteString? Otherwise I would go for the "transmit the length of what to expect"-solution.
Fortunately there is an easy way to hide newlines.
Use "show"
That will wrap newlines as \n, as well as coping with other odd characters like NULL which might upset a C library (if you're talking to C at any point).
Then you use "read" on the far end.
This sounds good, but don't I throw away all (possible) performance gains of transmitting ByteStrings directly when using show/read to convert them to ordinary strings and back? Thanks, Timo