Portable file handling in Dancer apps

If you want your app to be easily portable between different systems and different platforms, it's important not to write file-handling code in a platform-specific way.

Dancer provides some utility functions in Dancer::FileUtils which help you to deal with files in a portable manner.

Portable file paths

Depending on the platform, directory separators may vary.

To get round this, Dancer::FileUtils/path allows you to assemble paths easily:

my $views_dir = Dancer::FileUtils::path(setting('appdir'), 'views');

path() uses File::Spec internally.

Reading file contents

Dancer::FileUtils/read_file_content provides a way to quickly retrieve the content of a file, and behaves sensibly depending on the context it was called in:

# Read entire file contents into $content:
my $content = Dancer::FileUtils::read_file_content($filename);

# Read each line of file into @lines:
my @lines = Dancer::FileUtils::read_file_content($filename);

The application's charset setting will be taken into account when opening the file, and will default to UTF-8 if no charset setting is present, so UTF-8 data should Just Work.

Dancer::FileUtils/read_glob_content works in the same manner, but takes an open filehandle, reads the content from it, and closes the handle.

Opening a file

Dancer::FileUtils/open_file provides a way to open a file, taking the app's charset setting into account, and returns a filehandle:

my $fh = open_file('<', $file) or die ...;

Setting filehandle mode

If you have a filehandle you've opened yourself, you can use Dancer::FileUtils/set_file_mode to apply the app's charset setting (or default to UTF-8) encoding.

AUTHOR

David Precious