An unvalidated string slice type

Often when dealing with serialized data (from networks or disk), you need to work with strings. Your specification might say that these strings should be UTF-8, or you might be working with an older file format that does not require UTF-8, but you expect to find UTF-8 data anyway.

There is a cost to validating UTF-8 strings, in CPU time. Validating also adds new error modes; what do you do when a legacy file contains a string that is not valid UTF-8? You could fail to parse the file entirely, or you could tolerate the error as best as you can. In some cases, you just use strings from one data structure to find matching entries in another data structure, so it is not even important that the strings are not always valid UTF-8.

This crate provides the RawStr type, which simply wraps a &[u8] value. It provides Debug and Display impls, which will display the string the string if possible.

Use RawStr::from_bytes to wrap a &[u8] value. Use RawStr::as_bytes to get the &[u8] slice.

This is not meant to be a sophisticated or full-featured crate. It simply serves a niche need.

Author and acknowledgments

I have listed myself (Arlie Davis (arlie.davis@gmail.com)) as the "author" of this crate, because RawStr is a widely-applicable abstraction. However, I want to acknowledge the influence of the nearly-identical RawString type from the pdb crate. I wrote the equivalent of that type for some similar work that I am doing, that spans much more than just PDB files, so I thought it would be best to have a separate crate.