On Saturday, 26 October 2013 at 21:23:13 UTC, Gautam Goel wrote:
Dumb Newbie Question: I've searched through the library reference, but I haven't figured out how to extract a substring from a string. I'd like something like string.substring("Hello", 0, 2) to return "Hel", for example. What method am I looking for? Thanks!
There are a lot of good answers in this thread but I also think they miss the real issue here.
When working with Unicode, you'll want to stop thinking in terms of indices, in order to produce correct code. Getting a sub-string by passing indices is a means to an end; you'll want to replace the index paradigm with an approach that does not rely on indices.
Working with indices where the smallest unit is a code point (dchar), which has been suggested in this thread, is still not good enough because you'll either a) potentially break up grapheme clusters, which can have disastrous results, or b) end up redundantly searching through the string to find the correct code point positions.
With Phobos, you can use algorithms such as `find` and the `findSplit` family of algorithms to do string manipulation without using indices, and the cool thing about this approach is that as long as the input strings are properly formed UTF and have intact grapheme clusters, it's impossible to get Unicode-incorrect results!
When working with ASCII, just slice.
