Create an StcsChan astStcsChan
A StcsChan is a specialised form of Channel which supports STC-S I/O operations. Writing an Object to an StcsChan (using astWrite) will, if the Object is suitable, generate an STC-S description of that Object, and reading from an StcsChan will create a new Object from its STC-S description.
Normally, when you use an StcsChan, you should provide "
source"
and "
sink"
functions which connect it to an external data store by reading and writing the
resulting text. These functions should perform any conversions needed between
external character encodings and the internal ASCII encoding. If no such functions
are supplied, a Channel will read from standard input and write to standard
output.
Alternatively, an XmlChan can be told to read or write from specific text files using the SinkFile and SourceFile attributes, in which case no sink or source function need be supplied.
If "
source"
is NULL and no value has been set for the SourceFile attribute, the
StcsChan will read from standard input instead.
If "
sink"
is NULL, and no value has been set for the SinkFile attribute, the StcsChan
will write to standard output instead.
"
printf"
format specifiers identified by "
%"
symbols in the
normal way. "
options"
string contains "
%"
format specifiers,
then an optional list of additional arguments may follow it in order to supply
values to be substituted for these specifiers. The rules for supplying these are
identical to those for the astSet function (and for the C "
printf"
function). If the external data source or sink uses a character encoding other than ASCII, the supplied source and sink functions should translate between the external character encoding and the internal ASCII encoding used by AST.
A null Object pointer (AST__NULL) will be returned if this function is invoked with the AST error status set, or if it should fail for any reason.