On 8 Jun '08, at 3:39 AM, Michael Ash wrote:
I never cared about the lack of regex support personally, although I understand that people do use them. As far as a blessed solution goes, "man regex" gives you a library that's in libSystem and is part of POSIX, so it's as supported as you can get.
And (as discussed a few weeks ago) it's not Unicode-savvy, which could bite the unwary developer in the ass, especially when attempting to localize their app into non-Roman languages like Japanese.
I do this with a fair amount of regularity. NSString is unsuitable for working with data whose encoding is unknown or doubtful, and NSData doesn't have any string-like functionality, so the standard C str functions can be very useful here.
Ouch. The problem with those is that, every time you call one, you've added a potential buffer overrun bug to your app. And if the data in the string came from an untrusted source like the network, that escalates to a potential security vulnerability.
Also, speaking of doubtful encodings, the regular C string functions will fail quite badly on 16-bit character encodings, where it's more than likely that every other byte is a zero.
My general tactic when dealing with unknown data whose encoding can't be determined is to just fall back on CP-1252 [though Aki Inoue suggested MacRoman], both of which are supersets of ascii that map every byte to a character. That way you'll always get a non-nil NSString, and any ascii text in the original will come out unscathed. That's a better result than you'll get with C string APIs.
—Jens
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