[plt-scheme] reading a whole file

From: Shriram Krishnamurthi (sk at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 10 00:05:13 EST 2008

Fast on the heels of this thread, today I had to insert a bunch of
JavaScript gobbledygook into each of my HTML files.  Here's the Scheme
code I wrote:

----------
(define tracker "... gobbledygook goes here ...
")

(define (go f)
  (let ([txt (with-input-from-file f
               (lambda () (read-string (file-size f))))])
    (let ([new-txt
           (regexp-replace (regexp "</HEAD>")
                           txt
                           (string-append tracker "</HEAD>"))])
      (if (string=? txt new-txt)
          (printf "Pattern not found in ~a~n" f)
          (with-output-to-file "out"
            (lambda () (write-string new-txt)))))))

(go (vector-ref (current-command-line-arguments) 0))
----------

[Orthogonal note: writing the gobbledygook was itself a bit painful,
and made me better appreciate Python's quoting.]

I then launched this from a `find' command in the shell that would
locate the .html files, do a quick check relating "out" to the
original, and then mv out to override original.

I eyeballed the output to make sure there were no instances of
"Pattern not found".  There was one, and I was able to cross-check why
and make sure there was no problem.

It sure would have been nice to make the above code both shorter and
more robust with FILE->STRING and STRING->FILE...

[This is really just a response to Richard, who seemed to be arguing
against such primitives.  The "optics" argument is actually stood on
its head here: my hand-written code is the 80...let's call it 60%
solution, because it does no error-checking, probably doesn't handle
Unicode, certainly doesn't care about automicity due to assumptions
about myself, etc.  At any rate, given that this is *not* being used
in a compositional manner, the 80% solution of reading the file into
memory, processing it, and writing it back out seems to me just the
right thing.  Counter-argument?]

Shriram


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