Module Bi_stream

module Bi_stream: sig .. end

Streaming utilities (experimental)

This module offers a streaming interface for representing long lists of elements that cannot fit in memory. Stream items are serialized as chunks of configurable length.

Stream format (independent from the biniou serialization format):

  ( ONE INT64 BYTE* )* ZERO

where INT64 is the length of a chunk (unsigned big-endian 64-bit int), i.e. the number of following BYTEs. ONE and ZERO are the single-byte representations of 1 and 0 and are used to indicate whether the end of the stream is reached.

val read_stream : (string -> 'a array) -> Pervasives.in_channel -> 'a Stream.t

read_stream of_string ic creates an OCaml stream from an input channel ic. The data come in chunks and each chunk is converted from a string to an array by calling of_string.

Raises Failure if the data in the channel is corrupted or if a chunk is larger then Sys.max_string_length.

val write_stream : ?chunk_len:int ->
       ('a array -> string) -> Pervasives.out_channel -> 'a Stream.t -> unit

write_stream to_string oc st writes an OCaml stream to the output channel oc. It creates chunks of chunk_len, except for the last chunk which is usually smaller. chunk_len must be chosen such that the resulting strings are smaller then Sys.max_string_length.

chunk_len : has a default value of 1024.