Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Ways to Read a File

Let’s look at some options when it comes to reading files. We’ll start by writing five little programs that open a file and input the data in a number of ways.

The contents of a file are just a sequence of bytes. Whether they mean anything depends upon the interpretation of these bytes.

To demonstrate this, we’ll use the same input file for all our examples. It actually contains a sequence of Erlang terms. Depending upon how we open and read the file, we can interpret the contents as a sequence of Erlang terms, as a sequence of text lines, or as raw chunks of binary data with no particular interpretation.

Here’s the raw data in the file: