Thank you so much, that's exactly the kind of reply I was seeking!
On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 00:13:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2013 19:34:20 Carl Sturtivant wrote:
On Saturday, 10 August 2013 at 17:09:29 UTC, Carl Sturtivant
wrote:
> What's the simplest way in D to read a file token by token,
> where the read tokens are D strings, and they are separated
> in
> the file by arbitrary non-zero amounts of white space
> (including spaces, tabs and newlines at a minimum)?
I couldn't find a function that did just this, and various
ways I
implemented it seemed too complex. Is there such a function in
a
D library?
If you have a string (or any range of dchar) already, you can
use
std.algorith.splitter:
import std.algorithm;
void main()
{
auto str = "hello world goodbye charlie.";
assert(equal(splitter(str),
["hello", "world", "goodbye", "charlie."]));
}
However, reading from a file is quite a bit more problematic,
as we don't have
proper stream stuff yet (we're still waiting on std.io to be
finished so that we
can have that). And that means that what we have for reading
files is a lot
less flexible. In general, you're probably going to be reading
it in line by
line with std.stdio.byLine, in chunks of bytes via
std.stdio.byChunk, or all
at once with std.file.readText.
Something that does what you want could certainly be built on
top of either
byLine or byChunk without a lot of effort, but it obviously
doesn't work right
out of the box. readText will work great (since you can just
use splitter on
its result), but it does mean reading the entire file in at
once. Still, in
most cases, that's what I'd do. It's only going to be a problem
if the file is
going to be particularly large, and since splitter is just
slicing the string
that you give it (rather than copying it), you shouldn't end up
with the file
in memory more than once.
At some point, we will have full, range-compatible stream
support in Phobos,
and the situation will definitely improve, but for now, those
are probably your
best options.
- Jonathan M Davis
