module Bi_stream

: sig

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.

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 has a default value of 1024. The limit supported by this OCaml implementation on 32-bit platforms is 16777215.

end