Writing Files in Wolfram Language

Here’s the translation of the Go code example to Wolfram Language, with explanations in Markdown format suitable for Hugo:

Writing files in Wolfram Language follows similar patterns to the ones we saw earlier for reading.

To start, here's how to dump a string (or just bytes) into a file:

```mathematica
Export["/tmp/dat1", "hello\nWolfram Language\n", "Text"]

For more granular writes, we can use OpenWrite to open a file for writing:

stream = OpenWrite["/tmp/dat2"];

It’s good practice to close the stream when we’re done with it. We can use CheckAbort to ensure the stream is closed even if an error occurs:

CheckAbort[
  (* File operations here *)
  ,
  Close[stream]
]

You can write strings to the stream as you’d expect:

WriteString[stream, "some\n"];
WriteString[stream, "writes\n"];

To write raw bytes, you can use BinaryWrite:

BinaryWrite[stream, {115, 111, 109, 101, 10}];

To ensure all buffered operations have been applied to the underlying writer, use Flush:

Flush[stream];

Finally, close the stream:

Close[stream];

Here’s a complete example that demonstrates these concepts:

Export["/tmp/dat1", "hello\nWolfram Language\n", "Text"];

stream = OpenWrite["/tmp/dat2"];
CheckAbort[
  WriteString[stream, "some\n"];
  BinaryWrite[stream, {115, 111, 109, 101, 10}];
  WriteString[stream, "writes\n"];
  Flush[stream];
  ,
  Close[stream]
]
Close[stream];

After running this code, you can check the contents of the written files:

$ cat /tmp/dat1
hello
Wolfram Language

$ cat /tmp/dat2
some
some
writes

In Wolfram Language, file I/O operations are typically more high-level and abstracted compared to languages like Go. The language provides powerful functions like Export for writing various data types to files, and Import for reading them back. For more complex operations, you can use lower-level functions like OpenWrite, WriteString, and BinaryWrite.

Next, we’ll look at applying some of these file I/O ideas to input and output streams.