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Google's Protocol buffer uses the C++ standard string class std::string as variable size byte array (see here) similar to Python where the string class is also used as byte array (at least until Python 3.0).
This approach seems to be good:
assign and fast direct access via data that is not allowed with vector<byte>
byte*.But I am curious: Is that the preferred way for a byte arrays in C++? What are the drawbacks of this approach (more than a few static_casts)
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There are two ways to convert byte array to String: By using String class constructor. By using UTF-8 encoding.
While std::string has the size of 24 bytes, it allows strings up to 22 bytes(!!) with no allocation.
Remember that a string is basically just a byte array For example, the following code iterates over every byte in a string and prints it out as both a string and as a byte.
The std::string class manages the underlying storage for you, storing your strings in a contiguous manner. You can get access to this underlying buffer using the c_str() member function, which will return a pointer to null-terminated char array. This allows std::string to interoperate with C-string APIs.
Personally, I prefer std::vector, since std::string is not guaranteed to be stored contiguously and std::string::data() need not be O(1). std::vector will have data member function in C++0x.
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