Erlang error: no function clause matching io:request - erlang

Question

I'm an experienced programmer new to Erlang and I'm stuck on the following:
myread() ->
{_, MyData } = file:read_file( "hands.txt" ),
io:format( "hands-out.txt", "~w", MyData ).
yields, when myread() is invoked from the shell:
** exception error: no function clause matching io:request("hands-out.txt",
{format,"~w", <<"3h 5h 7h 8h 3h 5h 7h 8h q"...>>})
(io.erl, line 556) in function io:o_request/3 (io.erl, line 63)
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Two things:
"hands-out.txt", "~w" needs to be one string: "hands-out.txt: ~w"
and the data that's replacing the ~w needs to be a list. So:
io:format( "hands-out.txt: ~w", [MyData] ).
See http://erlang.org/doc/man/io.html#format-2
Also, you should pattern match on the status value in the return from file:read_file/1. In your version, an error, which would be returned as {error, Reason} would match here, since you're using _, and you'd print the error reason rather than the file, which might be confusing.
So either make it {ok, MyData } = file:read_file( "hands.txt" ) if you want to crash on read error, or something like the following if you want to handle that case:
myread() ->
case file:read_file( "hands.txt" ) of
{ok, MyData } ->
io:format( "hands-out.txt: ~w", [MyData] );
{error, Error} ->
io:format("Error: ~w~n", [Error])
end.