[r6rs-discuss] Mixed binary and ascii data in a single file

From: Bradley Lucier <lucier>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 16:20:24 -0400

On Aug 8, 2007, at 4:03 PM, Alan Watson wrote:

> Astronomical FITS files also have an ASCII header followed by
> binary data. One option is to treat the file as binary and grab the
> header character by character. Another is to open the file twice,
> once as an ASCII text stream and once as a binary stream, read the
> header from the text stream, calculate the length of the header in
> bytes, offset the binary stream to the start of the binary data,
> and finally read the data from the binary stream.

Thanks for your reply. Now that you remind me, I remember that I've
worked with FITS files, too, in the now-distant past.

The r6rs solutions seem fairly clumsy compared to what is available
in Gambit (and perhaps in other implementations), where you can
change the buffering of a port after it has been opened. (Or at
least, you can safely change it from unbuffered to buffered after it
has been opened.)

Brad
Received on Wed Aug 08 2007 - 16:20:24 UTC