Re: io:lines() and \0

[Philipp Janda <siffiejoe@...>]

Am 21.02.2014 16:23 schröbte Javier Guerra Giraldez:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> > For me, only text files have lines
>
>
> i concur.

Me too, but the problem is that you can only find out if a file is a 
text file when you have read it from beginning to end. "Garbage in, 
garbage out" is ok for internal functions, but not for APIs exposed to 
the end-user. And reading files is always exposed to the user of the 
filesystem (with the possible exception of temp files).

> i would even accept if io.lines() raised an error if called with a
> file that wasn't opened in text mode.

`io.lines()` always opens the file in text mode, you probably meant 
`file:write()`.
I wouldn't. I need binary streams for UTF-8, latin1, etc. (basically 
everything except ASCII) ...

> of course, i much prefer the contract to be clearly stated "due to the
> underlying old C implementation, embedded control characters can make
> it return wrong results.  if you need to read binary data, use
> file:read()"

Philipp