From: Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov <listbox@...>
Date: 2006-06-15T23:25:50+09:00
Subject: Re: A plan for another unicode string hack


On 15-jun-2006, at 15:59, Paul Battley wrote:

> On 15/06/06, James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
>> On Jun 15, 2006, at 8:13 AM, Patrick Hurley wrote:
>>
>> > I have to concur. If we are taking votes, I like the byte_ prefix:
>> > byte_size, byte_length -- and these will remain important even  
>> within
>> > pure ruby (e.g. when doing block based IO).
>>
>> I agree.
>
> I don't agree. If you are doing block-based IO with a string, wouldn't
> the best way be just to set its encoding to raw/unset? It would then
> behave as a byte-based string. There's no need for a whole suite of
> byte_-prefixed methods.

You do need them because otherwise you have to switch contexts just  
to access bytes transparently:

with_some_context do
  byte_length = str.length
end

What I would love to have though is a reverse of my accessor thingy -  
so that we have a String#bytes, which bypasses to a byte string, but  
the methods
of the string itself are character-bound

--
Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl