Re: [q-lang-users] Two proposed improvements to Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

John Cowan wrote:
> What you've got looks good.  For strings, I had something in mind like
> 
>         get_string Bytes EncodingName StartIndex EndIndex
> 
> to decode a portion of a byte string into a string, and
> 
>         put_string Bytes EncodingName Index String

Should the indices be byte offsets? Also, put_string would just
overwrite the part of the string at the given offset, right? In that
case it should be easy to get that kind of functionality with existing
routines, I just need to add a function to replace a slice of a byte
string in-place.

> to encode a string into a portion of a byte string.  These allow you to
> process character data wherever it might exist in a binary sequence.
> However, the latter produces an unpredictable number of bytes, and might
> need to be supplemented with a factory
> 
> 	byte_string EncodingName String

If I understand this correctly, bytestr already provides that
functionality. That is, you can use 'bytestr (S,CODESET)' to create a
byte string in a given encoding from a string, and you can even do
'bytestr (S,CODESET,SIZE)' if you want the byte string to be truncated
or zero-padded to fit a given size. Is that what you meant?

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag