Is it possible to read a file from the file system?

[benjamin-thomas]

I had a quick look at stdlib but found nothing.

Thanks :)

[htstudios]

I'd suggest joining our community discord for questions: https://discord.gg/twY7ZhKTM3

If you are using Erlang as the server side VM then there is https://github.com/gleam-lang/erlang

[lpil]

Check out this module in the gleam_erlang package

https://hexdocs.pm/gleam_erlang/gleam/erlang/file.html

[benjamin-thomas]

Thanks you both @htstudios @lpil :)

Here is a little working example for any future googlers (I'm not sure how to do proper error handling obviously but that's a good start)

Gleam looks (very) nice, I'm very much intrigued by it. I'm looking at the Elixir/Phoenix combo this week and haven't looked at Erlang before.

My plan would be to hopefully use Gleam for the complicated business logic stuff if it all works out.

Keep up the good work ;)

P.S. @htstudios the discord link does not work. When I click on the button, I get a reply saying "impossible to accept the invitation"

gleam.toml

name = "dictionary"
version = "0.1.0"

[dependencies]
gleam_stdlib = "~> 0.22"
gleam_erlang = "~> 0.10"

[dev-dependencies]
gleeunit = "~> 0.6"

dictionary.gleam

import gleam/io
import gleam/erlang/file
import gleam/string
import gleam/list

// Call to Erlang
pub external fn random_int(n) -> Int =
  "rand" "uniform"

fn sys_dict() -> String {
  "/usr/share/dict/words"
}

pub fn random_word() -> String {
  assert Ok(contents) = file.read(sys_dict())
  let words = string.split(contents, on: "\n")
  let rand_idx = random_int(list.length(words) - 1)
  assert Ok(word) = list.at(words, rand_idx)
  word
}

pub fn main() {
  io.println(random_word())
}

[htstudios]

@benjamin-thomas sorry for linking to gh instead of hex.pm latter is usually much more helpful.

AFAIR the reason the stdlib does not contain file utilities is platform differences between Erlang and JavaScript.

But for random() there is support :) https://hexdocs.pm/gleam_stdlib/gleam/int.html#random and https://hexdocs.pm/gleam_stdlib/gleam/float.html#random

[benjamin-thomas]

Nothing to be sorry about @htstudios ;)

Thanks for the heads up about ‘random()’!