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From: doucet@ripolin.laas.fr (Jean-Etienne Doucet)
Subject: Re: Reading a line of arbitrary length
Date: 1997/02/19
Message-ID: <5ef263$3oq@news.cict.fr>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 219869306
Distribution: world
References: <330319F1.41C67EA6@innocon.com>
Organization: LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse (France)
Reply-To: doucet@ripolin.laas.fr
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-02-19T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>



About reading arbitrarily long strings, I've found (in a french book
about Ada(83)) something like the following:


with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

function Get_Long_String return String is

   type Ref_String is access String;
   
   Buffer : Ref_String := new String'("");
   Input  : Character;

begin -- Get_Long_String

   while not End_Of_Line loop
      Get (Input);
      Buffer := new String'(Buffer.all & Input);
   end loop;
   Skip_Line;
   
   return Buffer.all;

end Get_Long_String;


The question about storage usage was resolved by the fact that leaving the
scope of the Ref_String type would free the storage used by the successive values
of Buffer.all.

I can't fully test it, because my installation can't support input lines longer
than 255 characters :-(

If you've got comments about this construct, I'd be happy to hear them.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Jean-Etienne Doucet / LAAS-CNRS / Toulouse, France       E-mail: doucet@laas.fr