[Haskell-cafe] readFile and closing a file

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Mitchell, Neil wrote:

> Hi Henning,
>
> I tend to use openFile, hGetContents, hClose - your initial readFile
> like call should be openFile/hGetContents, which gives you a lazy
> stream, and on a parse error call hClose.

Yes, this seems to be the right way. This weakness should be mentioned in 
the docs of readFile. In production code, you cannot rely on a garbage 
collector to close the file, because you might want to open a file for 
writing after you have processed it with readFile, and there is warranty 
that the file is already closed then.