Is there an equivalent to toStringz for wide strings?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On 2011-04-04 16:44, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 4/5/11, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:
> > Not to mention, in the case above, a null
> > character should automatically be appended onto the end of the string,
> > since it's as string literal.
> 
> I've always found this confusing. So If I have this char array:
> char[] foostring = "foo".dup;
> 
> null is appended to it? So what happens to the null terminator if I
> append another string to foostring? And if I do a copy, e.g.
> foostring[0..$], does this still copy a null terminator?

The null terminator is not actually part of the string. It's one beyond the 
end. In effect, it's "foo"[$] (though that would probably throw as long as 
array bounds checking is turned on). So, any array operations that you do on 
the string will lose the null terminator. It's just that if you pass it to a C 
function or some other function that's going completely off of the pointer 
(rather than the D array) and which hasn't been told the length of the string, 
it's going to see the null terminator at one past the end of the actual array.

So, you can do something like

printf("hello world\n");

or

auto s = "hello world";
printf(s.ptr);

But as soon as you do anything which would cause the array to reallocate or be 
copied, you lose the null terminator. It's not really part of the string. It's 
one past the end of the string and is there purely for convenience when 
dealing with C functions. So, it's lost as soon as you start treating the 
string a as D string and do any array or string operations on it which would 
copy or change it.

- Jonathan M Davis