Subject: suggestion: adding read-line function to elisp

From: xah lee <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:13:51 -0800

summary:
i'd like to have a  read-line function in elisp, that will read a  
given file and return a list of lines.

The reason is that in almost all modern scripting langs (php, perl,  
python, ruby), there's such a function, so that users can get a list  
of lines of a file in about single line of code. Getting lines as  
list is a very frequent need.

elisp is very suitable for tasks of text processing. So, having such  
a convenience function seems appropriate.

Here's a implementation:

(defun read-lines (file)
   "Return a list of lines in FILE."
   (with-temp-buffer
     (insert-file-contents file)
     (split-string
      (buffer-substring-no-properties 1 (point-max)) "\n" t)
     )
   )

Thanks.

The thought came from a recent newsgroup discussion in comp.lang.lisp
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/ 
761fe827c8c9ea5e/

Here's a short article for some context:

• A Ruby Illustration of Lisp Problems
   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lisp_problems_by_ruby.html

   Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄