I'm just wondering what the "recommended" and "most efficient" way to do that is?

front + popFront is suboptimal, because you have to evaluate the code point length twice.

Some sort of fancy "stride" or "decode" scheme?

Or can I just go ahead and use "foreach", knowing that it is both easy to use, and super efficient?

On Sunday, October 14, 2012 10:07:22 monarch_dodra wrote:
> I'm just wondering what the "recommended" and "most efficient" way to do that is?
> 
> front + popFront is suboptimal, because you have to evaluate the code point length twice.
> 
> Some sort of fancy "stride" or "decode" scheme?
> 
> Or can I just go ahead and use "foreach", knowing that it is both easy to use, and super efficient?

If you're just outright iterating over a string and operating on each element individually, then I see no reason not to use foreach. Just remember to make the variable dchar:

foreach(dchar c; str) {...}

I don't think that you're going to get more efficient than that unless what you're doing would work operating on code units instead of code points, but in that case, iterating probably wouldn't be what you'd want to do anyway. Where it gets more interesting is where you're doing things more complicated than simply iterating and operating on each code point individually. Then what the most efficient thing is depends on what you're doing and functions like stride and decode can come into play.

- Jonathan M Davis