The basic strategies for console I/O print and printnl are used to write terms to stdout or stderr (or any other opened file). They both take a tuple. The first element of the tuple is the file to write to, the second is a list of terms. Each term in the list be converted to a string, and and these strings will be concatenated together to form the resulting output. The printnl will also append a newline to the end of the resulting string.

The following module should be compiled with strc, as usual.

module example
imports liblib
strategies
  main = 
    <print> (stdout, ["baz"])
    ; <printnl> (stdout, [ "foo", 0, "bar" ])

After compiling this file, running it will give the following result:

$ ./example
bazfoo0bar
$

Notice how the string baz will be written without a newline (or other space). Also, notice how the terms in the list argument were concatenated.

When using these strategies in the Stratego Shell, some care must be taken when using the std* files, as the following example shows.

stratego> <printnl> (stdout(), [ "foo", 0, "bar" ])
foo0bar

The shell requires that you put an extra parenthesis after the stdout.

The debug and error are convenience wrappers around printnl. They will always write their result to stderr. The error strategy is defined as:

error =
  where(<printnl> (stderr, <id>))

It is used similarly to the printnl strategy:

stratego> <error> ["foo", 0, "bar"]
foo0bar

The debug strategy accepts any term, i.e. not only lists of terms. The term will be written verbatim:

stratego> <debug> [ "foo", 0, "bar" ]
["foo",0,"bar"]

The library provides a small set of simple file and directory manipulation operations. Assume the directory /tmp only contains the files foo, bar, baz. Elementary directory operations can be done as illustrated below:

stratego> <readdir> "/tmp"
["foo","bar","baz"]
stratego> <rename-file> ("/tmp/foo", "/tmp/bax")
"/tmp/bax"
stratego> <remove-file> "/tmp/baz"
[]
stratego> <link-file> ("/tmp/bar", "/tmp/foo")
"/tmp/foo"
stratego> <link-file> ("/tmp/bar", "/tmp/foo")
"/tmp/foo"
stratego> <new-temp-dir> "/tmp"
"/tmp/StrategoXTnsGplS"

The library contains a family of strategies which must be applied to a File, and will return information about it. these include isdir, isatty, isfifo and islnk which are predicates checking if a file is a directory, TTY, FIFO or a symbolic link, respectively. To obtain a File object in the first place, we should call file-exists followed by filemode. Thus, checking if /etc is a directory is done as follows:

stratego> <file-exists ; filemode ; isdir> "/etc"

The library also has another family of strategies for getting information about files. These must be applied to a string containing the filename. The family includes is-executable, is-readable and is-writeable.

stratego> <is-executable> "/bin/bash"
"/bin/bash"

Finally, the directory strategies also include the usual suspects for dealing with paths.

stratego> <is-abspath> "../foo"
command failed
stratego> <dirname> "/foo/bar/baz"
"/foo/bar"
stratego> <base-filename> "/foo/bar/baz"
"baz"
stratego> <get-extension "/tmp/foo.trm"
"trm"
stratego> <abspath> "../foo"
/home/karltk/source/oss/stratego/strategoxt-manual/trunk/../foo

There are also a few strategies for finding files. We shall describe find-file(s). The other variants of find-file are described in the library documentation. The strategy find-file(s) finds one file with a specific file extension in a list of directories. It takes a two-element tuple. The first element is a file name as a string, then second element is a list of paths, i.e. (f, [d*]). The extension of f will be replaced by what is produced by s, and the directories given in [d*]. Consider the code below.

stratego> <find-file(!"rtree")> ("file.str", ["."])

This snippet will consider the filename file.str, replace its extension with rtree and look through the directories in the list ["."]. Effectively, it will search for file.rtree in the current directory.

Opening a file is done with the fopen strategy. It takes a two-element tuple, the first element is the filename as a string, the second is the open mode, which is also a string. The most important modes are read (r); write ("w") which opens and empty file for writing, truncating any existing file with the same name; and append (a) which appends to the file if it already exists. After all file operations stream have been finished, it should be closed with fclose, which will flush and close the file. Explicit flushing can also be done with fflush.

It should be pointed out that reading and writing text files with Stratego is rather rare. Normally, text files are read with a parser generated from an SDF description and written using a pretty-printer defined in the Box formalism. In rare cases, this may turn out be too heavy handed, especially if the file format is simplistic and line-based. In this instance, we can come up with an easier solution using read-text-file and read-text-line.

Assume the file /tmp/foo contains the following lines:

one
two
three

We can read this file in one big chunk into a string with the read-text-file strategy, which must be applied to a filename:

stratego> <read-text-file> "/tmp/foo"
"one\ntwo\nthree\n"

Alternatively, for example if the file is large, we can read it line by line. In this scenario, we must open the file and get a handle to a stream.

      
stratego> <fopen> ("foo.txt", "r") => inp
Stream(136788400)
stratego> <read-text-line> inp
"one"

The primary form of file I/O you will be using in Stratego is reading and writing terms. As explained earlier, the terms are stored on disk as either binary, compressed text or plain text ATerms. Reading a term, no matter which storage format, is done with the ReadFromFile strategy. It is applied to a filename.

stratego> <ReadFromFile> "/tmp/foo.trm"
Foo(Bar)

To write a term to file, you can use WriteToTextFile or WriteToBinaryFile. The binary format is approximately eight times more space-efficient on average. Both strategies take a two-element tuple where the first element is the filename and second is the term to write. Writing the current term requires a minor twist, which is shown here:

stratego> <WriteToBinaryFile> ("/tmp/bar.trm", <id>)
Foo(Bar)

It is also possible to read and write terms from and to strings, using read-from-string and write-to-string. Chapter 23 contains explanation of how these strategies work.

The strategies for logging are used pervasively throughout the Stratego toolchain. They are easy to use in your own applications, too. The logging system is built on top of the log(|severity, msg) and log(|severity, msg, term) strategies. It is possible to use these directory, as the following example demonstrates.

stratego> import util/log
stratego> log(|Error(), "my error")

However, it is preferrable to use the high-level wrapper strategies fatal-err-msg(|msg), err-msg(|msg), warn-msg(|msg) and notice-msg(|msg). Except for fatal-err-msg, these strategies will return with the current term untouched, and write the message as a side effect. The fatal-err-msg strategy will also terminate the program with error code 1, after writing the message.