Manipulate ByteStrings using Char operations. All Chars will be truncated to 8 bits. It can be expected that these functions will run at identical speeds to their Word8 equivalents in Data.ByteString.

More specifically these byte strings are taken to be in the subset of Unicode covered by code points 0-255. This covers Unicode Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement and C0+C1 Controls.

See:

• http://www.unicode.org/charts/
• http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf
• http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf

This module is intended to be imported qualified, to avoid name clashes with Prelude functions. eg.

 import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B

O(n) Convert a String into a ByteString

For applications with large numbers of string literals, pack can be a bottleneck.

scanl is similar to foldl, but returns a list of successive reduced values from the left:

 scanl f z [x1, x2, ...] == [z, z `f` x1, (z `f` x1) `f` x2, ...]

Note that

 last (scanl f z xs) == foldl f z xs.

scanl1 is a variant of scanl that has no starting value argument:

 scanl1 f [x1, x2, ...] == [x1, x1 `f` x2, ...]

O(n) replicate n x is a ByteString of length n with x the value of every element. The following holds:

 replicate w c = unfoldr w (\u -> Just (u,u)) c

This implemenation uses memset(3)

O(n), where n is the length of the result. The unfoldr function is analogous to the List 'unfoldr'. unfoldr builds a ByteString from a seed value. The function takes the element and returns Nothing if it is done producing the ByteString or returns Just (a,b), in which case, a is the next character in the string, and b is the seed value for further production.

Examples:

 unfoldr (\x -> if x <= '9' then Just (x, succ x) else Nothing) '0' == "0123456789"

O(n) Like unfoldr, unfoldrN builds a ByteString from a seed value. However, the length of the result is limited by the first argument to unfoldrN. This function is more efficient than unfoldr when the maximum length of the result is known.

The following equation relates unfoldrN and unfoldr:

 unfoldrN n f s == take n (unfoldr f s)

spanEnd behaves like span but from the end of the ByteString. We have

 spanEnd (not.isSpace) "x y z" == ("x y ","z")

and

 spanEnd (not . isSpace) ps
    == 
 let (x,y) = span (not.isSpace) (reverse ps) in (reverse y, reverse x) 

breakEnd behaves like break but from the end of the ByteString

breakEnd p == spanEnd (not.p)

The group function takes a ByteString and returns a list of ByteStrings such that the concatenation of the result is equal to the argument. Moreover, each sublist in the result contains only equal elements. For example,

 group "Mississippi" = ["M","i","ss","i","ss","i","pp","i"]

It is a special case of groupBy, which allows the programmer to supply their own equality test. It is about 40% faster than groupBy (==)

O(n) Break a ByteString into pieces separated by the byte argument, consuming the delimiter. I.e.

 split '\n' "a\nb\nd\ne" == ["a","b","d","e"]
 split 'a'  "aXaXaXa"    == ["","X","X","X",""]
 split 'x'  "x"          == ["",""]

and

 intercalate [c] . split c == id
 split == splitWith . (==)

As for all splitting functions in this library, this function does not copy the substrings, it just constructs new ByteStrings that are slices of the original.

O(n) Splits a ByteString into components delimited by separators, where the predicate returns True for a separator element. The resulting components do not contain the separators. Two adjacent separators result in an empty component in the output. eg.

 splitWith (=='a') "aabbaca" == ["","","bb","c",""]

O(n) The isSuffixOf function takes two ByteStrings and returns True iff the first is a suffix of the second.

The following holds:

 isSuffixOf x y == reverse x `isPrefixOf` reverse y

However, the real implemenation uses memcmp to compare the end of the string only, with no reverse required..

O(n) The elemIndexEnd function returns the last index of the element in the given ByteString which is equal to the query element, or Nothing if there is no such element. The following holds:

 elemIndexEnd c xs == 
 (-) (length xs - 1) `fmap` elemIndex c (reverse xs)

count returns the number of times its argument appears in the ByteString

 count = length . elemIndices

Also

 count '\n' == length . lines

But more efficiently than using length on the intermediate list.

Read entire handle contents into a ByteString. This function reads chunks at a time, doubling the chunksize on each read. The final buffer is then realloced to the appropriate size. For files > half of available memory, this may lead to memory exhaustion. Consider using readFile in this case.

As with hGet, the string representation in the file is assumed to be ISO-8859-1.