• d-bugmail puremagic.com (43/43) Sep 22 2018 https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19259

d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19259

          Issue ID: 19259
           Summary: std.array.Appender needs a way to set the length
           Product: D
           Version: D2
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P2
         Component: phobos
          Assignee: nobody puremagic.com
          Reporter: johnnymarler gmail.com

std.array.Appender needs a way to extend/add to the length of `data`.  See the
following use case:

```
uint tryAppendFullPathNameImpl(const(wchar)* nullTerminatedPath,
Appender!(wchar[]) builder)
{
    import core.sys.windows.winbase : GetFullPathNameW;
    auto prefixLength = builder.data.length;
    for (;;)
    {
        const result = GetFullPathNameW(nullTerminatedPath, builder.capacity -
prefixLength,
            builder.data.ptr + prefixLength, null);
        if (result <= (builder.capacity - prefixLength))
        {
            // NO WAY TO DO THIS:
            //builder.overrideDataLength(prefixLength + result);
            return result;
        }
        builder.reserve(prefixLength + result);
    }
}
```

What's happening here is we are passing the Appender array to a C function that
populates the array with our resuling "full path".  Note that this
implementation is taken from .NET CoreFX:

https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/1bff7880bfa949e8c5e46039808ec412640bbb5e/src/Common/src/CoreLib/System/IO/PathHelper.Windows.cs#L72

The problem is that once it's populated, we have no way of extending the length
of the array after it was populated by the C function.

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