Support writing Iterator[Byte] to File

[pishen]

Support writing Iterator[Byte] to File

[pathikrit]

You are right. We need two APIs that can write:

1. Iterator[Byte] e.g. for piping in large movies
2. Iterator[String] -- this is for line by line. We need two versions of this - one to append and another to write.

[pathikrit]

Many large files are not always strings (e.g. a movie). Should this API then take in a Iterator[Byte] then?

[pishen]

Agree. But could it also support easily (or implicitly) transformation from Iterator[String] to Iterator[Byte]? Not sure if it should insert the \ns in between the Strings automatically?
Since better-files supports simple function like File.appendLines(), I hope there's also a similar simple way when appending an Iterator[String].

[pathikrit]

Let's say you have an val lines: Iterator[String], you can simply do this:

val lines: Iterator[String] = ???
lines foreach {line => file.appendNewLine(line)}

That being said, I do see a case for writing an Iterator[Byte] to a file ...

[pishen]

As I know, Files.write() will open and close the file on each call, using lines foreach {line => file.appendLine(line)} may not be efficient if my Iterator[String] is large? I'm looking for a solution as simple as this, but more efficient.
Anyway, this could be another feature request, I can change this one to Iterator[Byte] to keep it precise.

[pathikrit]

Take a look at my PR: #70

I added writeBytes and printLines. The latter takes in options to either append or overwrite.

[pishen]

Would it be possible to use the same function name like this?

def write(bytes: Array[Byte])
def write(bytes: Iterator[Byte])

def appendLines(lines: String*)
def appendLines(lines: Iterator[String])

[pathikrit]

That won't compile - you can't have same function name with same number of arguments.

[pishen]

Cool! Thanks for supporting this feature.

[pathikrit]

Will release v2.16.0 over the weekend