Re: Accepting arbitrary strings as structure field names

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Nov-2006, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

| Is it possible to insert a NUL character in an Octave string?

Yes:

  char ([102, 0, 0, 98, 97, 114])

After sending my message this morning, I tried saving a character
string like this and that part worked, but reloading it failed, only
loading up to the first NUL, so I fixed that problem.  I didn't check
all formats, though looking at the code it seemed that the HDF5 format
would not correctly save character strings with embedded NUL
characters because it appears to use a C-style string with no
associated length to pass the data.

When saving a struct, the field name is not saved like character
data.  Instead, it is saved like the name of a variable, like this:

  # name: NAME

using code like this:

  os << name << std::endl

and it is read back in a similar way, so I think it will fail for
field names with embedded NUL characters.  This is not a problem
currently because the names of variables are restricted.

Instead of overloading structures directly for this purpose, what
about making a new data type instead and using functions to add
elements to the table?

jwe