New strings Library#

DEP #:

4

Type:

Standards Track

Author:

Carl Gay

Status:

Accepted

Created:

08-Apr-2012

Last-Modified:

05-May-2012

Post-History:

01-May-2012, 09-Apr-2012

Dylan-Version:

2012.1

Abstract#

This proposal is an attempt to provide a simpler, more consistent strings API than is currently available via string-extensions, that is available from a single library (and a single module).

Goals#

  1. Comprehensive string APIs available via the strings module exported from the strings library.

  2. Consistent naming and parameter lists.

  3. As simple as possible to use for common tasks. Strive for the same simplicity as Python, for example.

  4. Where possible, functions introduced here should be useful when applied to standard Dylan mapping functions (map, every?, etc) and collection functions (sort, reverse, etc). In other words they should not require currying in order to be used with the mapping and collection functions for the most common cases.

  5. Replace existing string-extensions module, which will only be retained (on GitHub) so as not to break Gwydion Dylan unnecessarily. (It could be integrated into GD instead of being a submodule.)

Non Goals#

  1. Unicode

  2. Immutable strings

  3. Strings not implemented as subclasses of <sequence>.

  4. Text formatting APIs, such as justification and wrapping.

  5. Anything that is only applicable to a specific human language, such as pluralize.

Proposal#

Open Dylan currently has a hodge-podge of string manipulation functionality. A few functions (concatenate, subsequence-position, as-lowercase, …) are built into the dylan library, some functions are exported from various modules in the string-extensions library, and a few in common-dylan. Some Common Lisp-like strings functionality has been built into DUIM and Deuce. This proposal is an attempt to provide a richer strings API in a single “strings” module. This is complicated by the fact that some string operations are also applicable to generalized sequences.

The entire existing “strings” module (mainly used by the http library) will be replaced by this API.

I first present the entire API and then later discuss it in detail.

API Summary#

Export the following functions from the “strings” module of the “strings” library.

control?      (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
printable?    (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
graphic?      (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
alphabetic?   (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
alphanumeric? (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)

lowercase?  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
uppercase?  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
whitespace? (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)

decimal-digit?      (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
octal-digit?        (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
hexadecimal-digit?  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)

char-compare      (char1, char2) => (one-of(-1, 0, 1))
char-compare-ic   (char1, char2) => (one-of(-1, 0, 1))
char-equal-ic?    (char1, char2) => (boolean)

string-compare  (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2, test) => (one-of(-1, 0, 1))
string-equal?   (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-less?    (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-greater? (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-equal-ic?   (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-less-ic?    (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-greater-ic? (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)

starts-with? (string, pattern-string, #key test) => (boolean)
ends-with?   (string, pattern-string, #key test) => (boolean)

lowercase  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (new-char-or-string)
lowercase! (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (char-or-string)
uppercase  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (new-char-or-string)
uppercase! (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (char-or-string)

strip       (string, #key test = whitespace?, start, end) => (new-string)
strip-left  (string, #key test = whitespace?, start, end) => (new-string)
strip-right (string, #key test = whitespace?, start, end) => (new-string)

pad       (string, width, #key fill = ' ')
pad-left  (string, width, #key fill = ' ')
pad-right (string, width, #key fill = ' ')

find-substring     (string, pattern-string, #key start, end, ignore-case?) => (index-or-#f)
count-substrings   (string, pattern-string, #key start, end, ignore-case?) => (count)
replace-substrings (string, pattern-string, new, #key start, end, count, ignore-case?) => (new-string)

split-lines (string, #key remove-if-empty?) => (strings)

// For reference, the following functions are available via dylan
// or common-dylan and, although for general sequences, are
// often useful for strings as well...

concatenate (sequence, #rest more-sequences) => (new-sequence)
join (parts, separator, #key start, end, key, conjunction) => (string)
replace-elements! (big, predicate, new-value-fn, #key count) => (big)
replace-subsequence! (big, small, #key start, end) => (big)
split (string, separator, #key start, end, max, remove-if-empty) => (strings)

Some observations about this API:

  • Because this API provides start and end keywords where appropriate, it is possible to do string operations within larger strings without allocating.

  • Some functions, such as starts-with? and ends-with?, are provided just for readability, despite being trivial to implement in terms of other functions.

The remainder of this proposal will repeat the above API with discussion interspersed.

Discussion#

All comparisons default to being case-sensitive unless the function name ends with “-ic” or “-ic?” (meaning ignore case).

In all cases, start (or start1 or start2) parameters default to 0.

In all cases, end (or end1 or end2) parameters default to the size of the corresponding string.

control?      (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
printable?    (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
graphic?      (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
alphabetic?   (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
alphanumeric? (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)

lowercase?  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
uppercase?  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
whitespace? (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)

decimal-digit?      (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
octal-digit?        (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)
hexadecimal-digit?  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (boolean)

The methods on <character> do not have start and end parameters for obvious reasons.

The methods on <string> return true if they would return true for each character in the string. The <string> methods could be implemented as follows:

every?(f, copy-sequence(s, start: start, end: _end))

Making these functions work on strings makes the resulting code more concise than using every? and copy-sequence together, and also more efficient, since no allocation is necessary. The alternative is to write your own comparison function (which is the solution we have now, resulting in multiple implementations) or write a for loop inline.

Note that lowercase? and uppercase? return true for non-alphabetic characters, so (for example) to determine whether a string contains all uppercase alphabetic characters you would use:

alphabetic?(string) & uppercase?(string)

char-compare      (char1, char2) => (one-of(-1, 0, 1))
char-compare-ic   (char1, char2) => (one-of(-1, 0, 1))
char-equal-ic?    (char1, char2) => (boolean)

string-compare  (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2, test) => (one-of(-1, 0, 1))
string-equal?   (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-less?    (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-greater? (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-equal-ic?   (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-less-ic?    (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)
string-greater-ic? (string1, string2, #key start1, end1, start2, end2) => (boolean)

String and character comparisons, both case-sensitive and ignoring case (*-ic?). These default to comparing the entire string but allow comparing substrings via keyword arguments.

string-compare returns -1 if string1 is less than string2, 0 if the strings are equal, and 1 if string1 is greater than string2.

Some might object to the *-ic? functions on the grounds that a “test” parameter could be added to the non-*-ic? functions instead. But consider this type of code, which is likely to be fairly common:

sort(seq, test: string-less-ic?)

Instead one would have to write this:

sort(seq, test: rcurry(string-less?, test: char-compare-ic))

or worse, if char-compare-ic is removed on the same grounds:

sort(seq, test: rcurry(string-less?, test: method (c1, c2)
                                             char-compare(as-lowercase(c1), as-lowercase(c2))
                                           end))

or, the less efficient but more concise:

sort(seq, test: method (s1, s2) as-lowercase(s1) < as-lowercase(s2) end)

// Included here for completeness
=  (char-or-string, char-or-string) => (boolean)
<  (char-or-string, char-or-string) => (boolean)
>  (char-or-string, char-or-string) => (boolean)

If one doesn’t mind allocating memory, the above built-in functions can be used in place of explicit start and end parameters:

copy-sequence(s1, start: x, end: y) = copy-sequence(s2, start: w, end: z)

lowercase  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (new-char-or-string)
lowercase! (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (char-or-string)
uppercase  (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (new-char-or-string)
uppercase! (char-or-string, #key start, end) => (char-or-string)

The above are provided despite the existence of as-uppercase and as-lowercase in the dylan module because they provide start and end parameters, which makes them consistent with the rest of the API.

strip       (string, #key test = whitespace?, start, end) => (new-string)
strip-left  (string, #key test = whitespace?, start, end) => (new-string)
strip-right (string, #key test = whitespace?, start, end) => (new-string)

Return a copy of string between start and end with characters matching test removed. Characters are removed from the left and/or right side of string until the first character not matching test is found.

pad       (string, width, #key fill = ' ')
pad-left  (string, width, #key fill = ' ')
pad-right (string, width, #key fill = ' ')

The above return a new string of the given width. If string is shorter than width, the fill character is added to the left and/or right side of the string as appropriate.

Examples:

pad("x", 5) => "  x  "
pad("x", 4) => "  x " or " x  "    (unspecified)
pad("x", 7, fill: '.') => "...x..."

starts-with? (string, pattern-string, #key test) => (boolean)
ends-with?   (string, pattern-string, #key test) => (boolean)

These common operations are for convenience and readability. The test parameter is the same as for string-compare.

find-substring     (string, pattern-string, #key start, end, ignore-case?) => (index-or-#f)

find-substring is like subsequence-position except that it accepts start and end keyword arguments instead of count, and it only applies to strings so the ignore-case? argument has been added.

Note that this (and replace-substrings) use ignore-case? instead of a test parameter. This is because the implementation (Boyer Moore-ish search) needs to setup skip tables and the code for that needs to know explicitly whether case is being ignored.

count-substrings   (string, pattern-string, #key start, end, ignore-case?) => (count)

count-substrings counts the number of non-overlapping occurrences of pattern-string within big.

replace-substrings (string, pattern-string, new, #key start, end, count, ignore-case?) => (new-string)

replace-substrings returns a new string with occurrences of pattern-string replaced by new. If count is supplied then only count occurrences (moving left to right through string) are replaced. ignore-case? defaults to #f.

Dropped string-extensions Names#

A few names exported from string-extensions have no equivalent in this library:

  • The %parse-string module. This should be moved to regular-expressions if it’s needed at all.

  • The string-hacking module. This includes character sets, and a few character utilities.

  • The string-conversions module. The only names this exports that aren’t available elsewhere are digit-to-integer and integer-to-digit. I suggest we put basic conversions like this into common-dylan alongside string-to-integer et al.

  • Two names from the substring-search module: make-substring-positioner and make-substring-replacer.