Both text streams and binary streams map to records in iSeries Data Management files. They can be processed one character at a time or one record at a time.
Figure 83. iSeries Data Management Records Mapping to an ILE C Stream File
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Each text stream file and each binary stream file is represented by a file control structure of type FILE. This structure is defined in the <stdio.h> header file.
Attention: Unpredictable results may occur if you attempt to change the file control structure.
Table 8. Comparison of iSeries Data Management Text Streams and Binary Stream File Processing
| Text Streams | Binary Streams |
---|---|---|
Definition | An ordered sequence of characters that are composed of lines. Each line consists of zero or more characters and ends with a new-line character. | A sequence of characters that has a one-to-one correspondence with the characters stored in the associated iSeries Data Management file. On the iSeries system, the length of a binary stream file is a multiple of the record length. |
Impact of I/O Processing | The iSeries Data Management system may add, alter, or delete some special
characters during input or output. Therefore, there may not be a
one-to-one correspondence between the characters written to a text stream and
characters read from the same text stream. Data read from a text stream
is equal to data written to the text stream if all of the following are
true:
| Character translation is not performed on binary streams.
When data is written to a binary stream, it is the same when it is read back
later.
|
End-of-File Processing | When a file is closed, an implicit new-line character is appended to the end of the file unless a new-line character is already specified. | When a file is closed, the last record in the file is padded with nulls (hexadecimal value 0x00) to the end of the record. |
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