Simon Danisch and I are pleased to introduce FileIO.jl
(https://github.com/JuliaIO/FileIO.jl), a package for centralizing the
handling of formatted files. The package contains utilities for querying
files/filenames by their extensions and/or magic bytes to deduce their content.
It then allows package authors to "register" loaders/savers for detected file
formats.
Some of the advantages of using FileIO are:
- For users, this may reduce the searching required to answer "is there a
julia package to load file X?" Now you can just try `load("X.ext")` and see
what happens---if the loader has been registered, it will try to find the right
package for you.
- For developers, this allows you to decouple your package from others. If you
want to work with images, you will (once I tag a new release of Images.jl) no
longer need to make the Images package a dependency as long as you use FileIO.
In your package code, you can say `load("myimage.png")` and everything should
Just Work.
- For users and developers, this reduces name conflicts among two attractive
function names, `load` and `save`. If everyone imports those names from
FileIO, there need be no conflicts.
The package is relatively small and is fairly extensively documented.
While there are not a large number of formats currently registered, the
architecture already shows a lot of promise. For example, it can recognize our
.jld files as HDF5 files, something that escapes the well-tested (and much more
extensive) Unix `file` command.
Best,
--Tim & Simon
