Buffers And Strings Overview

This document provides an overview of buffers and strings.

Purpose

Manipulates strings and general data buffers.

Description

The central Symbian platform idiom for both strings and buffers is descriptors. Some APIs in this group, such as Literals, Lexical Analysis, and Package Buffers provide additional descriptor handling facilities. In some circumstances, applications may need to manage raw data buffers directly in memory. For this, the Dynamic Buffers and Raw Memory APIs are available.

APIs

Use the APIs as follows:

Circular Buffers Overview

Provides a fixed length first-in first-out queue of fixed size objects.

Descriptors Overview

Manipulates string and data buffer.

Dynamic Buffers Overview

Manipulates data buffers of variable length.

Lexical Analysis Overview

Provides string analysis and string-to-number conversions.

Literals Overview

Provides simple creation of descriptors that contain read-only literal text.

Package Buffers Overview

Allows any value type (T class) to be encapsulated as a descriptor, for the purpose of inter-thread parameter passing.

Raw Memory Overview

Performs simple manipulations of data in memory.