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Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition
book

Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

by Joe Armstrong
September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
548 pages
12h 25m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Ways to Write a File

Writing to a file involves pretty much the same operations as reading a file. Let’s look at them.

Writing a List of Terms to a File

Suppose we want to create a file that we can read with file:consult. The standard libraries don’t actually contain a function for this, so we’ll write our own. Let’s call this function unconsult.

lib_misc.erl
 
unconsult(File, L) ->
 
{ok, S} = file:open(File, write),
 
lists:foreach(​fun​(X) -> io:format(S, ​"~p.~n"​,[X]) ​end​, L),
 
file:close(S).

We can run this in the shell to create a file called test1.dat.

 
1>​ lib_misc:unconsult("test1.dat",
 
[{cats,["zorrow","daisy"]},
 
{weather,snowing}]).
 
ok

Let’s check that it’s OK.

 
2>​ file:consult("test1.dat").
 
{ok,[{cats,["zorrow","daisy"]},{weather,snowing}]} ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781941222454Errata