Virtual String System - a high level string and text processing library.

This repository is deprecated. VSS has been split into smaller more focused projects:

• vss-text: a library for Unicode text processing.
• vss-extra: libraries for handling JSON, Regexp, XML and other features based on vss-text. This will be further split into smaller projects.

This repository is kept as a read-only historic snapshot that will no longer evolve. Please refer to the above projects to continue using their corresponding features, and to be informed of upcoming changes.

The objectives of this project are

• To introduce a definite type that represents a string of Unicode characters and provides a handy set of operations.
• The API should be encoding independent and allows efficient implementations depending on platform/application and avoid extra encoding conversions, e.g. an UTF-8 internal representation for Gtk+ applications, UCS-2 for native Windows applications and UTF-16 for WebAssembly.
• Besides separating string API from in-memory data representation, it should separate string API from input/output stream representation.
• To provide a clear, well-defined semantic for iteration over string elements, such as unicode unit, grapheme cluster, etc.
• To avoid string element integer indexes, because this isn't necessarily constant time and could mislead about indexed element kind.
• To prefer safe results over raising exceptions where possible.

Warning: This is experimental work in progress, everything is subject to change. It may be or may be not part of GNATCOLL or standard Ada library in the future.

Note: Some Ada 2022 features are used in source code. This requires compiler that supports them.

Prefered way to install is to download sources and run

make all install PREFIX=/path/to/install

Or you can use Alire library manager:

alr get --build vss

Then you can use it as dependency in the project file:

with "vss_text.gpr";

For the JSON streaming API:

with "vss_json.gpr";

• API Reference
• Tips & Tricks

@AdaCore.

Feel free to dive in! Open an issue or submit PRs.

Apache License v2.0 with LLVM Exceptions.