Re: Overlap between StreamReader and FileReader

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>
> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 11:05 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
> wrote:
> >> What do you mean by "such features"? Are you saying that a Stream zip
> >> decompressor should be responsible for both decompressing as well as
> >> binary->text conversion? And thus output something other than a
> >> Stream?
> >
> > I meant that for specialized processing you'd likely want more than
> > just decoding. You mentioned HTML parsing which requires a fair amount
> > more.
>
> I don't think you want a HTML parser to do both decoding and parsing.
> That would result in a lot of code duplication in each component that
> are dealing with textual formats.
>
> > And if it's just decoding, we could extend
> > TextEncoder/TextDecoder to work with Stream objects.
>
> Sure, we can do that. The question is, what is the output from the
> TextDecoder if you pass it a Stream? A new TextStream type? Is that
> really better than adding the text-consuming functions to Stream?
>

We could introduce interfaces TextStream (readAsText) and BinaryStream
(readAsArrayBuffer) just representing as what type data can be consumed
from it.

But for convenience, I'd like to have output of XHR to have both. Stream
should carry raw binary, charset and MIME, and present them in convenient
form (methods) to user.

We can define convenience classes like this more generally.
- TextStreamWithOptinalTextEncoder
- BinaryStreamWithOptionalTextDecoder
There's either raw binary or text data behind it and does decoding/encoding
when necessary. What we're currently calling "Stream" and going to use for
XHR is BinaryStreamWithOptionalTextDecoder.

TextEncoder may be defined to accept TextStream and output a BinaryStream.
TextDecoder may be defined to accept BinaryStream and output a TextStream.