the documentation on readavailable still makes it sounds like you might actually want to use this function

[zhmz90]

julia> f = open("../data/ref/ucsc.hg19/ucsc.hg19.fasta")
IOStream(<file ../data/ref/ucsc.hg19/ucsc.hg19.fasta>)

julia> readavailable(f)
0-element Array{UInt8,1}

julia> readline(f)
">chrM\n"

julia> readavailable(f)
131066-element Array{UInt8,1}:
 0x47
 0x41
 0x54
 0x43
......

julia> readavailable(f)
0-element Array{UInt8,1}

julia> readline(f)
"AATAGTAGGCACCTAATATTTGTTGAAAAGG\n"

julia> readavailable(f)
131040-element Array{UInt8,1}:
 0x41
 0x41
......

while readavailable(s::IOStream) is expected to read all available data on the stream.

My Julia is the latest:

julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 0.5.0-dev+4582
Commit d98f2c0* (2016-06-07 22:00 UTC)
Platform Info:
  System: Linux (x86_64-linux-gnu)
  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2699 v3 @ 2.30GHz
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  BLAS: libopenblas (USE64BITINT DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY Haswell)
  LAPACK: libopenblas64_
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-3.7.1 (ORCJIT, haswell)

[vtjnash]

That's not what readavailable is expected to be able to do (that is what readall is for)

see #7478

[zhmz90]

Thanks. @vtjnash

[StefanKarpinski]

Can we just delete readavailable?

[StefanKarpinski]

Kidding, kind of.

[kshyatt]

Did this get resolved? Do we want to deprecate this function or improve the docs in some way?

[vtjnash]

  readavailable(stream)

  Read all available data on the stream, blocking the task only if no data is
  available. The result is a Vector{UInt8,1}.

It looks like the documentation still makes it sound like you might want to try to use this method, so I think this is still not resolved.