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?

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

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.