'\" '\" Copyright (c) 1994-1997 Sun Microsystems, Inc. '\" '\" See the file "license.terms" for information on usage and redistribution '\" of this file, and for a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES. '\" '\" RCS: @(#) $Id: StringObj.3,v 1.2 2001/09/14 01:42:16 zlaski Exp $ '\" .so man.macros .TH Tcl_StringObj 3 8.0 Tcl "Tcl Library Procedures" .BS .SH NAME Tcl_NewStringObj, Tcl_SetStringObj, Tcl_GetStringFromObj, Tcl_AppendToObj, Tcl_AppendStringsToObj, Tcl_SetObjLength, TclConcatObj \- manipulate Tcl objects as strings .SH SYNOPSIS .nf \fB#include <tcl.h>\fR .sp Tcl_Obj * \fBTcl_NewStringObj\fR(\fIbytes, length\fR) .sp \fBTcl_SetStringObj\fR(\fIobjPtr, bytes, length\fR) .sp char * \fBTcl_GetStringFromObj\fR(\fIobjPtr, lengthPtr\fR) .sp \fBTcl_AppendToObj\fR(\fIobjPtr, bytes, length\fR) .sp \fBTcl_AppendStringsToObj\fR(\fIobjPtr, string, string, ... \fB(char *) NULL\fR) .sp \fBTcl_SetObjLength\fR(\fIobjPtr, newLength\fR) .sp Tcl_Obj * \fBTcl_ConcatObj\fR(\fIobjc, objv\fR) .SH ARGUMENTS .AS Tcl_Interp *lengthPtr out .AP char *bytes in Points to the first byte of an array of bytes used to set or append to a string object. This byte array may contain embedded null bytes unless \fIlength\fR is negative. .AP int length in The number of bytes to copy from \fIbytes\fR when initializing, setting, or appending to a string object. If negative, all bytes up to the first null are used. .AP Tcl_Obj *objPtr in/out Points to an object to manipulate. .AP int *lengthPtr out If non-NULL, the location where \fBTcl_GetStringFromObj\fR will store the the length of an object's string representation. .AP char *string in Null-terminated string value to append to \fIobjPtr\fR. .AP int newLength in New length for the string value of \fIobjPtr\fR, not including the final NULL character. .AP int objc in The number of elements to concatenate. .AP Tcl_Obj *objv[] in The array of objects to concatenate. .BE .SH DESCRIPTION .PP The procedures described in this manual entry allow Tcl objects to be manipulated as string values. They use the internal representation of the object to store additional information to make the string manipulations more efficient. In particular, they make a series of append operations efficient by allocating extra storage space for the string so that it doesn't have to be copied for each append. .PP \fBTcl_NewStringObj\fR and \fBTcl_SetStringObj\fR create a new object or modify an existing object to hold a copy of the string given by \fIbytes\fR and \fIlength\fR. \fBTcl_NewStringObj\fR returns a pointer to a newly created object with reference count zero. Both procedures set the object to hold a copy of the specified string. \fBTcl_SetStringObj\fR frees any old string representation as well as any old internal representation of the object. .PP \fBTcl_GetStringFromObj\fR returns an object's string representation. This is given by the returned byte pointer and length, which is stored in \fIlengthPtr\fR if it is non-NULL. If the object's string representation is invalid (its byte pointer is NULL), the string representation is regenerated from the object's internal representation. The storage referenced by the returned byte pointer is owned by the object manager and should not be modified by the caller. .PP \fBTcl_AppendToObj\fR appends the data given by \fIbytes\fR and \fIlength\fR to the object specified by \fIobjPtr\fR. It does this in a way that handles repeated calls relatively efficiently (it overallocates the string space to avoid repeated reallocations and copies of object's string value). .PP \fBTcl_AppendStringsToObj\fR is similar to \fBTcl_AppendToObj\fR except that it can be passed more than one value to append and each value must be a null-terminated string (i.e. none of the values may contain internal null characters). Any number of \fIstring\fR arguments may be provided, but the last argument must be a NULL pointer to indicate the end of the list. .PP The \fBTcl_SetObjLength\fR procedure changes the length of the string value of its \fIobjPtr\fR argument. If the \fInewLength\fR argument is greater than the space allocated for the object's string, then the string space is reallocated and the old value is copied to the new space; the bytes between the old length of the string and the new length may have arbitrary values. If the \fInewLength\fR argument is less than the current length of the object's string, with \fIobjPtr->length\fR is reduced without reallocating the string space; the original allocated size for the string is recorded in the object, so that the string length can be enlarged in a subsequent call to \fBTcl_SetObjLength\fR without reallocating storage. In all cases \fBTcl_SetObjLength\fR leaves a null character at \fIobjPtr->bytes[newLength]\fR. .PP The \fBTcl_ConcatObj\fR function returns a new string object whose value is the space-separated concatenation of the string representations of all of the objects in the \fIobjv\fR array. \fBTcl_ConcatObj\fR eliminates leading and trailing white space as it copies the string representations of the \fIobjv\fR array to the result. If an element of the \fIobjv\fR array consists of nothing but white space, then that object is ignored entirely. This white-space removal was added to make the output of the \fBconcat\fR command cleaner-looking. \fBTcl_ConcatObj\fR returns a pointer to a newly-created object whose ref count is zero. .SH "SEE ALSO" Tcl_NewObj, Tcl_IncrRefCount, Tcl_DecrRefCount .SH KEYWORDS append, internal representation, object, object type, string object, string type, string representation, concat, concatenate