On 20 April 2005 22:35, Scott Turner wrote:
On 2005 April 20 Wednesday 15:56, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
I've been playing around with decoding binary files, and I couldn't find a function in the libraries to read a byte from a file. Does anyone know if there is such a function? ....... it seems that we should have: hGetByte :: Handle -> IO Word8
hGetByte could be implemented on top of hGetBuf and StorableArray, but the overhead would be ugly. Recently I needed binary input for similar reasons, and would have used hGetByte had it been available. I ended up performing input using a reasonable-sized buffer.
In GHC, you can assume that hGetByte h = do c <- hGetChar h; return (fromIntegral (ord c)) you must open the file in binary mode (openBinaryFile). I don't think this works with Hugs, though. Personally, I think this ought to be part of the redesign of the I/O library. hGetByte and hPutByte would be a stopgap. But, not much progress is being made on an I/O redesign right now. Cheers, SImon