auto merge of #19345 : steveklabnik/rust/gh19344, r=alexcrichton

Fixes #19344
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bors 2014-11-28 15:11:24 +00:00
commit 29e928f2ba

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@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ The `str` type is UTF-8 because we observe more text in the wild in this encodin
This does mean that indexed access to a Unicode codepoint inside a `str` value is an O(n) operation. On the one hand, this is clearly undesirable; on the other hand, this problem is full of trade-offs and we'd like to point a few important qualifications:
* Scanning a `str` for ASCII-range codepoints can still be done safely octet-at-a-time, with each indexing operation pulling out a `u8` costing only O(1) and producing a value that can be cast and compared to an ASCII-range `char`. So if you're (say) line-breaking on `'\n'`, octet-based treatment still works. UTF8 was well-designed this way.
* Scanning a `str` for ASCII-range codepoints can still be done safely octet-at-a-time. If you use `.as_bytes()`, pulling out a `u8` costs only O(1) and produces a value that can be cast and compared to an ASCII-range `char`. So if you're (say) line-breaking on `'\n'`, octet-based treatment still works. UTF8 was well-designed this way.
* Most "character oriented" operations on text only work under very restricted language assumptions sets such as "ASCII-range codepoints only". Outside ASCII-range, you tend to have to use a complex (non-constant-time) algorithm for determining linguistic-unit (glyph, word, paragraph) boundaries anyways. We recommend using an "honest" linguistically-aware, Unicode-approved algorithm.
* The `char` type is UCS4. If you honestly need to do a codepoint-at-a-time algorithm, it's trivial to write a `type wstr = [char]`, and unpack a `str` into it in a single pass, then work with the `wstr`. In other words: the fact that the language is not "decoding to UCS4 by default" shouldn't stop you from decoding (or re-encoding any other way) if you need to work with that encoding.