Re: [Chicken-users] string vs u8vector.

[Kon Lovett]

On Feb 1, 2008, at 11:01 AM, David Brown wrote:

> I'm noticing that most eggs and even a lot of the builtin libraries  
> use
> strings to manipulate binary data.  There is also a lot better  
> support for
> string manipulation (SRFI-13).

Yeah, but see below.

> However, R5RS doesn't require strings to be bytes.

In compiled code many of the R5RS string procedures are re-written to  
"core" implementations, due to the '(usual-integrations)' default.  
So, for example, even if the 'utf8' module is imported into the "top- 
level" 'string-length' would still return a byte-count.

This is not true for interpreted code, nor for SRFI-13 (assuming  
'utf8-srfi-13' is imported at the "top-level".)

> So, am I safe, in Chicken, to use strings for binary data?

Generally, yes. Also check out the blob type.

>   I start using
> u8vectors, and then discovered that a lot of libraries I wanted to  
> use to
> manipulate them wanted strings.
>
> The other possibility would be for me to enhance the libraries I'm  
> using to
> also work with u8vectors.

Yeah, Chicken idiom is very lazy w/ strings as binary vectors. I too  
would prefer something explicit.

> Thanks,
> David
>
>
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Best Wishes,
Kon