Re: Slurping a file (was: more spllitting travails)

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2024 at 2:48 PM Stephane Chazelas <stephane@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> IMO, it would be more useful if the result was returned in the
> variable whose name was given as argument (defaulting to REPLY
> if none was given like for read or sysread).

Could also read a file provided by name as an argument instead of only
reading stdin, but I elected to commit the most straightforward
version.

> And would be better if upon error the returned variable
> contained either what was successfully read or nothing (like
> read but unlikely sysread).

I had the impression this slurp-er was intended to work like examples
from other languages, which do not have "read"-like behavior.

> zslurp() {
>   emulate -L zsh -o no_multibyte
>   typeset -n _zslurp_var=${1-REPLY}

Is there really any reason to prefix the locals with "_zslurp_" ?
That's good practice if the function might call other code that's less
careful about it's names and scoping, or if you need to the variable
to become global, but nothing like that occurs here.