Strings

Elzed strings are represented as one-dimensional arrays of ASCII characters (no Unicode yet!). All strings are null-terminated. Elzed provides a rich set of string operators for your use.

Strings are stored differently in C++ and Visual Basic, and Elzed has been designed to accommodate the difference.

Within C++, Elzed accepts and returns pointers to null-terminated character strings. Do not store the character pointers returned by Elzed. If you must store the string values returned by Elzed, copy the returned string into your own storage.

Visual Basic, however, uses BSTR's to store strings. When passing a string to Elzed from VB, pass a BSTR by value: this has the effect of passing a pointer to a null-terminated character string. Elzed functions that normally return "conventional" strings return BSTR's to calls from Visual Basic. You are responsible for disposing the BSTR's returned by Elzed; VB will generally handle this for you automatically.

Strings may be of any arbitrary length, limited only by available memory.

String constants appear between quote marks. Use single or double quotes depending on the current setting of lzSetQuoteMark.

Elzed supports some sprintf-style inserts for non-printing characters:

When used inside quote marks, the insert symbol will be replaced with the non-printing character it represents.