Re: reading a text file into a string

["Nick Roberts" <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 16:16:33 GMT, Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com> wrote:

> Steve wrote:
>
>> This gives you the content of the file as one raw string.  Which
>> may or may not be what you want, but it is what you asked for.
>
> Right, including line terminators, page terminators, and file  
> terminators, if they exist, and which vary from system to system
> (under UNIX, lines are terminated by LF; under DOS/Windows, by CR
> LF; perhaps someone can comment on what happens with this approach
> under VMS).  Therefore, this approach is rarely used for
> production programs, which usually want a platform-independent
> representation of the file.

Not to mention other differences in basic file format and character  
encoding. On some systems, trying this will produce complete and utter  
rubbish, and on some systems it will fail (with an exception) when you try  
to open the file (because text and binary files are immiscible). I think  
the latter is the case on VMS with DEC Ada.

-- 
Nick Roberts