Intro to Clojure-clr: Using the spit function

A couple of weeks back I opened an issue with the Clojure-clr ‘team’ because I thought the spit function had a bug.   When I checked my email this morning I had a response from David Miller who runs the Clojure-clr port. In the email he politely showed me the error of my ways. I wanted to share this with anyone else who may have been looking to use spit to append to a file on the CLR.

Using spit the JVM way

When I was trying to see if I could use spit to append to a file I did a quick Google search and found this page on the ClojureDocs site for spit. When I saw their append example below I tried it in the Clojure-clr REPL.

I received no errors from the spit function but as you can see each call to the function was overwriting the previous call.  My next step was to try the same thing in the JVM REPL to see if it worked as the web page stated it should.  On the JVM spit worked as advertised.  Up to this point I hadn’t come across a core function on the CLR that didn’t have the same type of parameters as the JVM function. This lead me to believe I had found a bug so I submitted a bug report.

Using spit the CLR way

Fast forward a couple of weeks to the point where I checked my email this morning. In his response David laid out what I had done wrong and gave more information related to spit:

Lack of documentation is definitely an issue here.

Clojure 1.4.0-master-SNAPSHOT
user=> (spit "hi.txt" "Test 1\n" :file-mode System.IO.FileMode/Append)
nil
user=> (spit "hi.txt" "Test 2\n" :file-mode System.IO.FileMode/Append)
nil
user=> (println (slurp "hi.txt"))
WARNING: (slurp f enc) is deprecated, use (slurp f :encoding enc).
Test 1
Test 2

Generally, the options available are ones that can be handled by the appropriate methods/ctors in System.IO.

In the source:

Common options include

 :buffer-size   Ths size of buffer to use (default: 1024).
 :file-share    A value from the System.IO.FileShare enumeration.
 :file-mode     A value from the System.IO.FileMode enumeration.
 :file-access   A value from the System.IO.FileAccess enumeration.
 :file-options  A value from the System.IO.FileOptions enumeration.
 :encoding  The encoding to use, either as a string, e.g. \"UTF-8\",
            a keyword, e.g. :utf-8, or a an System.Text.Encoding instance,
            e.g., (System.Text.UTF8Encoding.)
More documentation is most certainly needed.

I gave it a try on my 1.3 REPL with the System.IO.FileMode/Append and it worked like a champ! 

Lessons Learned

So what did I learn from this?  Next time I come across something that I think is a bug I will check the Clojure-clr source first.  It is ok to write lazy code but the programmer himself cannot be lazy!

Summary

The CLR version of the spit function differs slightly from the JVM version.  We can use the :file-mode key with the value System.IO.FileMode/Append when we want to append to a file using spit.  It is also a good idea to check the Clojure-clr source prior to reporting any other issues I come across.  Thank you David for your kind response!