First 1000 characters without loop?

[Monte Goulding]

> On 23 Jun 2017, at 10:06 am, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> How can we know which is in use for a given string?

You shouldn’t need to know. The engine will use native encoding where possible for efficiency. A lot of the performance improvements between LC 7 and 8 were using the right code paths based on whether the string is native or unicode.
> 
> Suppose I wanted to process a lot of text, so performance is critical. Using bytes would be optimal, since any chunk type or even Unicode characters may vary in length.
> 
> So if I wanted to create an index of byte offsets into a large chunk of text, how would I know how long a character is?

If it’s text encoded then you probably want to use character offsets and let the engine worry about optimising it. If you know it’s binary data then use bytes.

Cheers

Monte