don't buffer when separator = "" about node-tail

[lucagrulla]

Hi @irickt,

Thanks for the suggestion. I kind of see what you are trying to add but I struggle to find a use case. Do you have one so I can fully understand your suggestion?

Thanks! :-)

The use case is debugging by tailing a log file containing json and parsing on the fly. The process didn't write the newline until the next log item so a newline separator failed to give the latest line. As a workaround I tried separator="" and it almost worked except tail was not returning the last } so the parser didn't yield the object. A corner case to be sure!

I ended up with this https://github.com/irickt/tailf using a fork of node-tail.

[lucagrulla]

Thanks for the explanation.

I guess I need to handle the last character properly before adding the feature to the library. I'll have a look at your fork and possibly add your suggestion and handle the corner case if possible.

Thanks again.

[dceejay]

Did you ever get round to thinking about this ?
It would also be useful for tailing binary files which by their nature could contain any character - so you ideally want to just spit out the whole new chunk that arrives... including the last character, but at least if it sent every character one at a time (as now) it would be ok.

[lucagrulla]

Hi @dceejay,

No I have not solved this.

[lucagrulla]

Fixed with release 1.4.0. To avoid buffering just pass null as parameter in the constructor.