Read and write known-length character data from and to a connection
DESCRIPTION:
Read and write known-length character data from and to a connection.
The strings do not have to be null terminated but
their lengths must be given.
USAGE:
readChar(con, nchars)
writeChar(object, con, nchars = nchar(object), eos = "")
ARGUMENTS:
object
character vector containing data to write
con
a connection object or a character string (taken to be a
file name). If the connection is open, it should be open in binary
mode and open for reading or writing, as appropriate. If it
is not open, it will be opened in binary mode and after the data
is processed it will be closed.
nchars
The lengths of the character strings. For
readChar
this is the number of bytes in the file to read for each string and
for
writeChar this is the number of bytes to write (not including
the
eos string).
length(nchars) is the number of strings
to read or write.
writeChar will pad a string with null
bytes if it is shorter than its corresponding nchars value.
eos
A scalar string to be written after each string in
object. The trailing null byte is also written. Use
eos=NULL to mean not to write anything after each string.
VALUE:
readChar returns the strings read and
writeChar
returns
NULL.