Re: What is best way to read and interpret binary files?

[mw via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Monday, 19 November 2018 at 22:32:55 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Actually, the case is unnecessary, because arrays implicitly 
convert to void[], and pointers are sliceable.  So all you need 
is:

        SomeStruct myStruct;
        fd.rawRead((&myStruct)[0 .. 1]);

This works for all POD types.

Writing the struct out to file is the same thing:

        SomeStruct myStruct;
        fd.rawWrite((&myStruct)[0 .. 1]);


This works, but I'm just wondering why we do not just add more 
functions to the library:

 rawRead(ref T t), and
 rawWrite(ref T t)

to read & write single value.


For arrays:

        SomeStruct[] arr;
        fd.rawWrite(arr);
        ...

        arr.length = ... /* expected length */
        fd.rawRead(arr);

Currently, the library only have this two functions for arrays.