Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Strings and Internationalization

There are two important topics related to string handling: creating strings dynamically and translating strings between character set encodings. These issues do not show up in the simple examples we have seen so far, but they will arise in more serious applications.

The DString Interface

It is often the case that you have to build up a string from pieces. The Tcl_DString data type and a related API are designed to make this efficient. The DString interface hides the memory management issues, and the Tcl_DString data type starts out with a small static buffer, so you can often avoid allocating memory if you put a Tcl_String type on the stack (i.e., as a local variable). The standard code sequence goes something ...