D (Tango) Read all standard input and assign it to a string

Question

In the D language how I can read all standard input and assign it to a string (with Tango library) ?

Answer 1

Another, probably more efficient way, of dumping the contents of Stdin would be something like this:

module dumpstdin;

import tango.io.Console : Cin;
import tango.io.device.Array : Array;
import tango.io.model.IConduit : InputStream;

const BufferInitialSize = 4096u;
const BufferGrowingStep = 4096u;

ubyte[] dumpStream(InputStream ins)
{
    auto buffer = new Array(BufferInitialSize, BufferGrowingStep);
    buffer.copy(ins);
    return cast(ubyte[]) buffer.slice();
}

import tango.io.Stdout : Stdout;

void main()
{
    auto contentsOfStdin
        = cast(char[]) dumpStream(Cin.stream);

    Stdout
        ("Finished reading Stdin.").newline()
        ("Contents of Stdin was:").newline()
        ("<<")(contentsOfStdin)(">>").newline();
}

Some notes:

• The second parameter to Array is necessary; if you omit it, Array will not grow in size.
• I used 4096 since that's generally the size of a page of memory.
• dumpStream returns a ubyte[] because char[] is defined as a UTF-8 string, which Stdin doesn't necessarily need to be. For example, if someone piped a binary file to your program, you would end up with an invalid char[] that could throw an exception if anything checks it for validity. If you only care about text, then casting the result to a char[] is fine.
• copy is a method on the OutputStream interface that causes it to drain the provided InputStream of all input.