• John Burton (6/6) Sep 05 2017 std.string.fromStringz will create me a string from a null
• Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn (12/18) Sep 05 2017 I'm fairly certain that to!wstring will do it, but it will definitely
• John Burton (9/28) Sep 05 2017 Thank you. I wanted something that didn't allocate in this case.

John Burton <john.burton jbmail.com> writes:

std.string.fromStringz will create me a string from a null 
terminated array of characters. But I have a zero terminated 
array of "short"s (from a win32 api call) which I'd like to turn 
into a wstring. But there doesn't seem to be a function to do 
this.

Do I need to write my own, or am I missing something?

Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn writes:

On Tuesday, September 05, 2017 08:15:04 John Burton via Digitalmars-d-learn 
wrote:
 std.string.fromStringz will create me a string from a null
 terminated array of characters. But I have a zero terminated
 array of "short"s (from a win32 api call) which I'd like to turn
 into a wstring. But there doesn't seem to be a function to do
 this.

 Do I need to write my own, or am I missing something?

I'm fairly certain that to!wstring will do it, but it will definitely
allocate, whereas fromStringz just slices what it's given. I don't think
that there's currently a wchar equivalent to fromStringz, but it would be
pretty trivial to write if you didn't want to use to!wstring. fromStringz is
just

    return cString ? cString[0 .. strlen(cString)] : null;

and all you'd have to do would be to replace strlen with wcslen from
core.stdc.wchar_. There's a decent chance that you'll want to allocate the
string though, in which case to!wstring would be the right choice.

- Jonathan M Davis

John Burton <john.burton jbmail.com> writes:

On Tuesday, 5 September 2017 at 08:39:37 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
 On Tuesday, September 05, 2017 08:15:04 John Burton via 
 Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
 std.string.fromStringz will create me a string from a null 
 terminated array of characters. But I have a zero terminated 
 array of "short"s (from a win32 api call) which I'd like to 
 turn into a wstring. But there doesn't seem to be a function 
 to do this.

 Do I need to write my own, or am I missing something?

 I'm fairly certain that to!wstring will do it, but it will 
 definitely allocate, whereas fromStringz just slices what it's 
 given. I don't think that there's currently a wchar equivalent 
 to fromStringz, but it would be pretty trivial to write if you 
 didn't want to use to!wstring. fromStringz is just

     return cString ? cString[0 .. strlen(cString)] : null;

 and all you'd have to do would be to replace strlen with wcslen 
 from core.stdc.wchar_. There's a decent chance that you'll want 
 to allocate the string though, in which case to!wstring would 
 be the right choice.

Thank you. I wanted something that didn't allocate in this case. 
The underlying storage will be kept for other reasons so I might 
as well have a string that just refers to the data contained in 
it.
I had done something like you suggested, but wondered if I'd 
missed something given the existence of a function for byte 
strings.