Extracted from Pike v8.0 release 28 as of 2015-09-20.
   

Method Stdio.Buffer()->read_hstring()


Method read_hstring

string(8bit) read_hstring(int(0..) n)

Description

Identical in functionality to read(read_number(n)) but faster.

Read a network byte order number of size n*8 bits, then return the indicated number of bytes as a string.

If there is not enough data available return 0.

Note that pike string can not be longer than 0x7fffffff bytes (~2Gb).