Re: Why doesn't DataInputStream implement Seekable ?

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-12-08 at 22:37 +0100, Martin Olsson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm wondering if there was any particular design rationale behind GLib not
> implementing the Seekable interface on the class DataInputStream?
> 
> If there is no particular reason, then I would like to file a feature request
> to get Seekable into DataInputStream or one of it's base classes.
> 
> I'm parsing a big file and I would like to seek to one specific location,
> read some data and then seek to a second location and read some data from
> there as well. As a workaround I tried to seek on the underlying FileInputStream
> that I passed as a parameter to the DataInputStream constructor but this
> hack didn't work reliably.

The reason that is not reliable is that GDataInputStream inherits from
GBufferedInputStream, and the buffer it has causes issues with the seek.

However, i don't think there is an inherent problem with implementing
seek in GBufferedInputStream (if the underlying stream supports it).
Would be a nice addition.