[Haskell-cafe] data.binary get reading beyond end of input bytestring?

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at googlemail.com
Thu Jul 29 06:13:40 EDT 2010


On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 19:01 +0900, Conrad Parker wrote:
> On 29 July 2010 17:46, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On 29 July 2010 07:53, Conrad Parker <conrad at metadecks.org> wrote:
> >
> >>> Something smells fishy here. I have a hard time believing that binary is
> >>> reading more input than is available? Could you post more code please?
> >>
> >> The issue seems to just be the return value for "bytes consumed" from
> >> getLazyByteString. Here's a small example.
> >
> > http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary/0.5.0.2/doc/html/Data-Binary-Get.html#v%3AgetLazyByteString
> >
> > getLazyByteString :: Int64 -> Get ByteString
> > An efficient get method for lazy ByteStrings. Does not fail if fewer
> > than n bytes are left in the input.
> >
> >
> > Because it does it lazily it cannot check if it's gone past the end of
> > the input. Arguably this is crazy and the function should not exist.
> 
> cheers Duncan, that confirms my guess about the reason. Would you
> accept a patch quoting you on that last point to the comment? ;-)

The consensus plan amongst the binary hackers is to eliminate lazy
lookahead functions and to rebuild binary on top of a continuation style
using strict chunks (then with lazy decoding built on top).

Duncan



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