View of binary files

[ekouts]

I am basically copying this issue by @giovannipizzi from pyFirecREST: eth-cscs/pyfirecrest#7

Currently, a GET to /utilities/view returns a string with the given file content. Would it be possible to have a binary version of it?
E.g. if I do view of a tar.gz i get

Status code: 400
JSON: {'description': 'Error on head operation', 'error': "'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte"}: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte

More generally (maybe this is not intended for binary files?) it would be important also for text files, in case e.g. they were written in some other non UTF-8 encoding, that would likewise fail.

[jpdorsch]

The idea of this endpoint is to see the content of a plain text file, thinking on the use case of checking what is being written in SLURM output or error files, or to show configuration files of a simulation, for instance.

I wouldn't use this to check the content of a binary file, moreover, if you try to see the content of a binary file without specific software you would get bytes without proper encoding (I guess).

In the case you are mentioning, we can try to include UTF-8 files in the same endpoint.

[jpdorsch]

This was clarified in the openapi doc here

firecrest/doc/openapi/firecrest-developers-api.yaml

Line 1142 in 81d60f0

summary: View the content of a plain text file (UTF8)