Re: Reading data from a file descriptor

[Chris Vine]

On Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:53:19 +0100
<address@hidden> wrote:
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> On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 11:54:33AM +0100, Amirouche Boubekki wrote:
> > On 2015-11-13 21:41, Jan Synáček wrote:  
> 
> [...]
> 
> > >I have an open fd to a unix socket and I want to read data from
> > >it. I know that the data is going to be only strings, but I don't
> > >know the length in advance.  
> > 
> > Do you know a delimiter? maybe it's the null char?
> > 
> > TCP is stream oriented, it's not structured at this layer into
> > messages or segments. You need some knowledge about the byte stream
> > to be able to split it into different meaningful piece for the
> > upper layer.  
> 
> I think I "got" Jan's request, because I've been in a similar
> situation before: delimiter is not (yet) part of it. What he's
> looking for is an interface à la read(2), meaning "gimme as much
> as there is in the queue, up to N bytes, and tell me how much
> you gave me". Of course, putting stuff in a byte vector would
> be preferable; the only functions I've seen[1] which "do" that
> interface are read-string!/partial and write-string/partial
> operate on strings, not byte arrays, alas.

guile's R6RS implementation has get-bytevector-some, which will do that
for you, with unix-read-like behaviour.

You cannot use this for UTF-8 text by trying to convert the bytevector
with utf8->string, because you could have received a partially formed
utf-8 character.  So for text, you should use line orientated reading,
such as with ice-9 read-line or R6RS get-line.

Chris