Smart way to convert a C string to a D string

[John Colvin]

On Wednesday, 7 August 2013 at 18:50:21 UTC, andrea9940 wrote:
> Hi, I have written a function to convert a C string to a D 
> string.
> I did not use to!string because it allocates a new string while 
> what I want is a dynamic array of type char[] pointing to the C 
> string.
>
> auto cstr2dstr(inout(char)* cstr)
> {
>     import core.stdc.string: strlen;
>     return cstr ? cstr[0 .. strlen(cstr)] : "";
> }
>
> As D newbie I'd like to know if this is the correct usage of 
> inout (it is needed to accept without distinction char*, 
> const(char)* and immutable(char)* right ?) and if there is 
> already a function in the standard D library which do that 
> conversion.

Another way of doing this is lazily with a range. *Very* 
basically done, just for char* and read-only:

struct Cstring
{
     size_t i = 0;
     char* str;

     this(char* s)
     {
         str = s;
     }

     @property bool empty()
     {
         return str[i] == '\0';
     }

     @property char front()
     {
         return str[i];
     }

     void popFront()
     {
         ++i;
     }
}