strings and ranges

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, August 15, 2013 02:48:58 Jason den Dulk wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> When working with my code I noticed that if I use front on a
> char[], it yields a dchar. Am I correct in concluding that it
> does a UTF-8 to UTF-32 conversion and popFont will skip the whole
> character, not just a code unit?
> 
> Also, does this mean that if I'm creating an output range for
> char[], will I need to implement a put(dchar) as well as a
> put(char)?

All strings are treated as ranges of dchar when using the range APIs, so you 
pretty much don't do anything with char or wchar where ranges are concerned 
unless you're optimizing a particular function for narrow strings. There is no 
reason to implement put(char), just put(dchar). Range-based code shouldn't 
generally care what type of string it's dealing with, so you wouldn't normally 
be writing any range-based code that cared about char[] unless you're 
optimizing a particular function's implementation (in which case, all of that 
would be internal to the function and wouldn't affect its semantics).

Here are a couple of stackoverflow questions that discuss ranges and strings. 
Perhaps, you'll find them useful.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16590650/how-to-read-a-string-character-by-character-as-a-range-in-d

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12288465/std-algorithm-joinerstring-string-why-result-elements-are-dchar-and-not-ch


- Jonathan M Davis

P.S. I really should finish writing the article that I started explaining 
ranges. So much to do, so little time.