How to determine allowable external formats at run time

[Alan Ruttenberg]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 7:14 PM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering if there is a way to get the list of allowable values of
> the :EXTERNAL-FORMAT keyword for OPEN. Is there a way to determine the
> possible values at run time? I looked into the source code for
> MAKE-FILE-STREAM but I got a little lost ... perhaps someone can point
> me in the right direction.
>
> What I'm trying to do is to verify whether a given format is
> acceptable. I am thinking that I can inspect a list to see if the
> given format is on the list. Another workable solution would be a
> function which can report whether the given format is acceptable, if
> such a function exists.
>

I don't know that there's a way to enumerate them. However you can call
open with an external format and it seems it will throw an exception if it
isn't one.

Undefined encoding: FUDGE
   [Condition of type simple-error]

Restarts:
 0: [retry] Retry SLIME REPL evaluation request.
 1: [*abort] Return to SLIME's top level.
 2: [abort] Abort thread.

Backtrace:
  0: (invoke-debugger #<simple-error {2EDCBCEA}>)
  1: org.armedbear.lisp.Lisp.error(Lisp.java:382)

There's also some documentation in FileStream.java
<https://github.com/armedbear/abcl/blob/master/src/org/armedbear/lisp/FileStream.java#L60>
that
shows that one of the possibilities is a list with a charset as car. You
can get the available charsets with

(loop for k being the hash-keys of (jss::hashmap-to-hashtable
(#"availableCharsets" 'charset.charset)) collect k)

Alan


>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Robert Dodier
>
>
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