The trivial way to read a file into a string in OCaml is this (thanks, StackOverflow):
let read_file_to_string (path: string): string =
let stream = open_in path in
try
let len = in_channel_length stream in
let str = really_input_string stream len in
close_in stream;
str
with _ ->
close_in_noerr stream;
raise (Failure ("Failed to read file: " ^ path))
But this doesn't work on Windows: really_input_string throws End_of_file
because the readable length of the file is less than the length attested by
in_channel_length. I don't care to debug this. This alternative implementation
works:
let read_file_to_string (path: string): string =
let rec read_stream stream =
try
let line = input_line stream in
line :: (read_stream stream)
with End_of_file ->
[]
in
let stream = open_in path in
String.concat "\n" (read_stream stream)
This was the one thing preventing the bootstrapping compiler for Austral from working on Windows.