[Biophp-dev] Pdraw filetype parser updated

[S Clark]

On Thursday 08 May 2003 09:02 am, nicos@itsa.ucsf.edu wrote:
> I guess that when the parser opens the stream, it should also close it
> again.  However,when an application opens a stream, I guess the
> application should open it.  That leaves a problem with our Parser class
> opening streams...  Ideas?

Well, the "most polite" way of handling it would be to have the layer
that did the opening do the closing (if an application opens a stream
and passes it to the Parse (or Import or whatever it ends up being named)
object, it ought to be left open for the application to close.  If
a filename gets passed to the parse object to open, the parse object
should close it...

On the other hand, that adds (slightly) to the necessary complexity (Parse
object has to remember later whether it was passed an already-open handle or
just a filename [or just text]).
If we WANTED to, it would probably be realistically reasonable to simply
have the Parse layer or even the individual filetype parsers close
the filehandle when they get to the end.  Kind of a toss-up, really.

Probably the former option is the "better" one, if we want to deal with
it immediately.  (If we adopt that, we'll want to do the same with the
filetype parsers, for the case where someone passes an filename/URL and
specifies the filetype...)