How to reverse char[]?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, February 08, 2012 09:35:28 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 08:32:32AM -0800, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > Except that char[] is _not_ an array of characters. It's an array of
> > code units. There is a _big_ difference. Not even dchar[] is an array
> > of characters. It's both an array of code units and an array of code
> > points, but not even that quite gets you characters (though at this
> > point, Phobos pretty much treats a code point as if it were a
> > character). If you want a character, you need a grapheme (which could
> > be multiple code points). _That_ is where the problem comes in.
> > 
> > You can definitely do array operations on strings. In fact, it can be
> > very desirable to do so if you want to process strings efficiently.
> > But if you treat them like you would ubyte[], you're in for a heap of
> > trouble thanks to how unicode works.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Except that the point of my code was to fix byte-order so that they can
> be correctly interpreted. I suppose I really should be using ubyte[] for
> that instead, and perhaps use a union to translate it to char[] when I
> call decode().

You shouldn't normally have to worry about byte order on char[] at all. So, I 
don't know what you'd be doing that would result in them being in the wrong 
order. But char is a UTF-8 code unit by definition, so if you're doing 
something that involves char[] not being a valid array of UTF-8 code units, 
you're almost certainly going to want to be using ubyte[] instead. There's a 
lot of stuff in Phobos which will through if you have invalid code points.

- Jonathan M Davis