Avoid memcpy? about tiny-utf8

[DuffsDevice]

Hi Kelas, currently, string manipulation without buffer ownership (as in memory mapped files) is not supported by tinyutf8. However, it is not supported by std::string either (and therefore not in std::string::assign as well).

You might add this into "Projects > Feature Requests", but I don't know if I or anyone else will find the time to implement it without resulting into too much runtime overhead in the library.

Thank you however for your interest, if there is anything else I can help you with, let me know.

Cheers,
Jakob

[kelas]

Hey Jakob, you're right — what I had in mind is std::string_view

[DuffsDevice]

Oh, yes, std::string_view does not have memory ownership! But, you know [thinking about implementing string_view for utf8] I would have to implement most every function in utf8_string in utf8_string_view, which I don't have the time for right now 🙊

[MoAlyousef]

Oh, yes, std::string_view does not have memory ownership! But, you know [thinking about implementing string_view for utf8] I would have to implement most every function in utf8_string in utf8_string_view, which I don't have the time for right now 🙊

Not a solution, but a temporary one is to provide an implicit conversion operator like:
operator std::string_view() const { return std::string_view(data(), size()); }

Which should allow passing utf8_string as a string view into functions, and all the string_view functions would be available. The user should be warned though on the gotchas associated with it (not being able to iterate over code points etc), unless the user instantiates a new utf8_string from the std::string_view.