On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 4:50 AM, bearophile <[email protected]> wrote: > Jonathan M Davis: > >> It's not necessarily a bad idea, > > I don't know if it's a good idea. > > >> but I'm not sure that we want to encourage code >> that assumes ASCII. It's far too easy for English-speaking programmers to >> end up >> making that assumption in their code and then they run into problems later >> when >> they unexpectedly end up with unicode characters in their input, or they >> have to >> change their code to work with unicode. > > On the other hand there are situations when you know you are dealing just > with digits, or few predetermined symbols like ()+-*/", or when you process > very large biological strings that are composed by a restricted and limited > number of different ASCII chars. > > Bye, > bearophile >
Can't you just use byte[] for that? If you're 100% sure your string only contains ASCII characters, you can just cast it to byte[], feed that into algorithms and cast it back to char[] afterwards, I guess. Cheers, - Daniel
