Re: Reading the while standard input into a String

["robin" <robin51@dodo.mapson.com.au>]

"Natasha Kerensikova" <lithiumcat@gmail.com> wrote in message news:slrniunb6n.i18.lithiumcat@sigil.instinctive.eu...
| Hello,
|
| I have encountered what was a very easily solved problem in C: dump the
| whole contents of the standard input into some place in memory, in order
| to process it afterwards.

It's also trivial in PL/I:

do forever;
    allocate line;
    get edit (line) (L);
end;

or read each line into an array element or whatever.

| I was quite unhappy with the preprocessing performed by Ada.Text_IO, so
| I went on using the text stream interface. However I still read
| character by character into a temporary buffer, and it feels ugly. Here
| is the code:
|
| with Ada.Strings.Unbounded;
| with Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams;
|
|   Source : Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams.Stream_Access
|     := Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams.Stream (Ada.Text_IO.Standard_Input);
|
|   procedure Read_Chunk (To : out String; Last : out Natural) is
|   begin
|      Last := To'First - 1;
|      for J in To'Range loop
|         Character'Read (Source, To (J));
|         Last := J;
|      end loop;
|   exception
|      when Ada.Text_IO.End_Error => Null;
|   end Read_Chunk;
|
|
|   procedure The_Program is
|      -- some tuff
|      Input : Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Unbounded_String;
|   begin
|      declare
|         Chunk : String (1 .. 256);
|         Last : Natural;
|      begin
|         loop
|            Read_Chunk (Chunk, Last);
|            Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Append (Input, Chunk (1 .. Last));
|            exit when Last < Chunk'Last;
|         end loop;
|      end;
|
|      -- Process Input or To_String (Input);
|   end The_Program;
|
| Is there a better/smarter/less ugly way to achieve the same result?