Does D language or any of its libraries support opening, reading and writing to binary files in binary mode?

Cheers,
Mitja

"Mitja Ursic" <Mitja_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:d1kujb$1g86$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Does D language or any of its libraries support opening, reading and
> writing to
> binary files in binary mode?

IMO there isn't much reason to distinguish between "binary" and "text" file modes with modern OSes.  You can certainly accomplish what you need to do with std.stream.File.  There is no need to open a file for binary or text mode - you just write.

import std.stream;

void main()
{
    File f=new File("test.bin", FileMode.OutNew);
    int x=5;
    float y=10.3;
    f.write(x);
    f.write(y);
    f.writeLine("This is regular text, even though there is no text file
mode");
}

Mitja Ursic wrote:
> Does D language or any of its libraries support opening, reading and writing to
> binary files in binary mode?

Sure. The std.stream module shouldn't have a problem doing that.

This example shows how to extract a file from a .zip archive:
http://www.dsource.org/tutorials/index.php?show_example=121

(The std.file module was used to read the file, but I'm sure std.stream can read binary files, too.)

-- 
Justin (a/k/a jcc7)
http://jcc_7.tripod.com/d/

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> IMO there isn't much reason to distinguish between "binary" and "text" file modes with modern OSes.

So? What takes the burden of checking that line ends correspond to the platform? Let me remind you of the line end conventions:

C and derivant languages: "\n"
Unix: "\n"
Windows: "\r\n"
MacOS (including OSX): "\r"

So, there are following options:
* do no conversions - so does C library in binary mode - the user must do them if he needs to. A variant of this option would be to provide abstractions for EOL input and output, and requiere the user to make use of them whenever he outputs text - which would break normal C-style text handling though and limit the usefulness of C libraries.
* convert different or plaform-specific line end sequences to "\n" on input, and back to platform-standard from "\n" on the output. Naturally, this will totally garble the binary output. So does C library in text mode.
* always provide 2 accesses into the same stream - one for binary IO which would not garble, and the one for text IO which can modify the input and output.

-eye

"Ilya Minkov" <minkov@cs.tum.edu> wrote in message news:d1nd4e$p2r$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> So? What takes the burden of checking that line ends correspond to the platform?

That would be std.stream.readLine()'s burden.

"Read a line that is terminated with *some combination of carriage return and line feed* or end-of-file. "

From the phobos doc.  Note the starred text ;)