eliminate junk from std.string?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/11/11 1:45 PM, Jerry Quinn wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
>
>> On 1/9/11 4:51 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> There's a lot of junk in std.string that should be gone. I'm trying to
>>> motivate myself to port some functions to different string widths and...
>>> it's not worth it.
>>>
>>> What functions do you think we should remove from std.string? Let's make
>>> a string and then send them the way of the dino.
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>
>> I have uploaded a preview of the changed APIs here:
>>
>> http://d-programming-language.org/cutting-edge/phobos/std_string.html
>
> Unclear if iswhite() refers to ASCII whitespace or Unicode.  If Unicode, which version of the standard?

Not sure.

enum dchar LS = '\u2028';                                   /// UTF line 
separator
enum dchar PS = '\u2029';                                   /// UTF 
paragraph separator

bool iswhite(dchar c)
{
     return c <= 0x7F
         ? indexOf(whitespace, c) != -1
         : (c == PS || c == LS);
}

Which version?

> Same comment for icmp().  Also, in the Unicode standard, case folding can depend on the specific language.

That uses toUniLower. Not sure how that works.

> There is room for ascii-only functions, but unless a D version of ICU
> is going to be done separately, it would be nice to have full
> unicode-aware functions available.

Yah, I'm increasingly thinking of defining an AsciiChar entity and 
perhaps a Zstring one for zero-terminated strings.

> You've got chop() marked as deprecated.  Is popBack() going to make
> sense as something that removes a variable number of chars from a
> string in the CR-LF case?  That might be a bit too magical.

Well I found little use for chop in e.g. Perl. People either use chomp 
or want to remove the last character. I think chop is useless.

> Rather than zfill, what about modifying ljustify, rjustify, and
> center to take an optional fill character?

Yah, I wanted to do that but postponed because it's quite a bit of work 
with general dchars etc.

> One set of functions I'd like to see are startsWith() and endsWith().  I find them frequently useful in Java and an irritating lack in the C++ standard library.

Yah, those are in std.algorithm. Ideally we'd move everything that's 
applicable beyond strings to std.algorithm.


Andrei