Files and Buffers

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 2/1/18 8:27 PM, Seb wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 February 2018 at 21:42:33 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On 2/1/18 4:36 PM, Jerry Ferris wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm developing a program that will either receive data from stdin or 
>>> a file, and pass it along to a function for processing. I want to 
>>> place this data into a buffer so there only has to be one version of 
>>> the function. However, since I'm new to D, I'm unsure how to go about 
>>> this in the most idiomatic way.
>>
>> https://dlang.org/phobos/std_file.html#read
>>
>> Then cast to ubyte[].
> 
> 
> There's also always std.string.representation which imho looks nicer 
> then the cast:
> 
> https://dlang.org/library/std/string/representation.html

std.file.read returns a void[].

I didn't see one that returns a ubyte[], and using the readText version 
is going to validate the text I think (which may not be desired). It 
really depends on the use case of the OP, but his original code was 
working with ubyte[] without validation, so I suggested the void[] 
return with cast.

It's a shame, actually, that ubyte[] isn't returned from read. I 
remember discussions at some point to change it, but that was shot down 
for some reason.

-Steve