www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/gforth/gforth_41.html

search

	Buy GNU books!

Gforth Manual

3.26.3 Scan file for a particular line

256 Constant max-line Create line-buffer max-line 2 + allot : scan-file ( addr u -- ) begin line-buffer max-line fd-in read-line throw while >r 2dup line-buffer r> compare 0= until else drop then 2drop ;

read-line ( addr u1 fd -- u2 flag ior ) reads up to u1 bytes into the buffer at addr, and returns the number of bytes read, a flag that's true when the end of file is reached, and an error code.

compare ( addr1 u1 addr2 u2 -- n ) compares two strings and returns zero if both strings are equal. It returns a positive number if the first string is lexically greater, a negative if the second string is lexically greater.

We haven't seen this loop here; it has two exits. Since the while exits with the number of bytes read on the stack, we have to clean up that separately; that's after the else.

Usage example:

s" The text I search is here" scan-file