File Stream Object

[LB]

The File Stream Object allows you to open multiple files at once without ever once loading them into memory. Once the files are open, you can get and set individual characters, shorts, integers, floats, doubles, and strings however you please.

This is especially useful for dealing with very, very large files that would take quite a long time to load into memory, and would then be using a lot of memory. Because this extension never actually loads the file into memory, you are safe to quickly open and save large files. This does not mean that it will accelerate fastloops to go through large files

[LB]

I have completely rewritten the object to support Unicode. This release includes one example file.

New features:

• Actual error handling - you can now use On Error and be notified of problems and mistakes while working with file streams
• Unicode support - unicode filenames are supported and you can read and write both UTF-8 and UTF-16/Unicode strings to/from files
• You can now read into memory and write from memory - great for e.g. Lacewing and Binary Object
• You can now change the read/write cursor positions before reading or writing
• More options for string handling, specifically length-terminated strings are now supported in the form of a four-byte integer size preceding the string and no null terminator
• Added condition to test if the read cursor is at the end of the file
• Added expressions that make it easier to read strings - UTF8/16 expressions to read a specific number of whole characters (rather than code points) and to read until a sentry string (e.g. newline or comma)

Changed features:

• The "File is OK" condition will now only be false if the file is in an unrecoverable state. If a read/write error occurred that is recoverable, you can still work with the file, but if this condition is false you must close the file and try again. Typically this could happen if you are reading/writing a file to a flash drive that is pulled out during the operation.

Removed features:

• The "clear error state" action is no longer supported because it is no longer necessary - recoverable error states are cleared automatically before each read/write operation. All error types, both recoverable and unrecoverable, now trigger On Error.

Download from here or via the attachment to this post. Always check here for the latest version. Report any issues here.

[LB]

The Windows XP support was not done properly in the previous version, so if you are having problems on Windows XP, I have fixed them in v1.2.2