Formatting floats and ints

[via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 15 March 2015 at 18:52:29 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 March 2015 at 17:11:07 UTC, Darts wrote:
>> Thanks! That works perfectly! ;) I'll remember they're called 
>> Format Strings now.
>>
>> Tangentially related follow up: if I want to cast a string to 
>> a dstring... what are the rules for that? I'm getting an 
>> "object.Error@(0): array cast misalignment" message when my 
>> program crashes tring to convert a string to a dstring...
>
> Casting in this case means reinterpreting the bytes of the 
> `string` as if it were a `dstring`. For this to work, the 
> string would have to start at an address and have and address 
> divisible by 4, which it evidently doesn't.
>
> Anyway, what you want is:
>
>     import std.conv : to;
>     string a = "Hello, world!";
>     dstring b = a.to!dstring;

Addendum:

In general, prefer std.conv.to over casts. They're supposed to be 
a low-level operation and can be dangerous if pointers or other 
reference types are involved. std.conv.to is more powerful (e.g. 
it can convert strings to ints, i.e. "42" => 42), and it also 
checks for overflow.