Pictured Above: Mocking up a mini grep program is easy with the right tools. Use mini_grep and any other sample programs as they arrive in the samples/ folder to test the utility and convenience of a str_view.
The str_view type is a simple, copyable, flexible, read only view of const char * data in C, modeled after std::string_view in C++. However, there are a few extra features including read-only tokenization and threeway comparison between plain const char * data and a str_view.
A str_view is a 16-byte struct and, due to this size, is treated throughout the interface as a copyable type. This is neither a trivially cheap nor excessively expensive type to copy. The intention of this library is to abstract away many sharp edges of working with C-strings to provide usage that "just works," not optimize for performance yet.
This library does not yet support the Windows platform.
Download and extract the latest release str_view-v[VERSION].zip from the Releases page.
See INSTALL.md file provided in this repo or in the downloaded release for full build and installation instructions.
Read the str_view.h interface for the full API and documentation.
This library is not yet version 1.0. To reach 1.0 I would like to implement the following.
- More robust suite of tests to detect Undefined Behavor common with string handling.
- Better documentation highlighting when I cannot protect the user from Undefined Behavior through programmer error.
- SIMD intrinsics. At the very least, SIMD implemented for the short string brute force searches is critical.
- Windows support. MSVC does not implement some significant features that make this library more robust and safer for string handling and I need to learn more about the platform. See this issue for more.
That being said, I have already found this library very helpful whenever I need to write C code. Please consider giving it a try.