String Class - Implementation

The String class will consist of two variables, a length (an integer, which will support any length strings) and a character pointer to the string. As mentioned, this is not a C/C++ 0 terminated character array, the length value determines the length of the string. A zero length string will have the length set to zero and the character pointer set to null (i.e. zero). There will also be allowance for a String to hold a C string constant (i.e. const char *), where the length will be set to -1.

The functions to implement now are ones that will be needed for the Parser, mainly constructors for creating String instances from a character array including one from two pointers (one pointing to the beginning of the string and one pointing to the character after the last one of the same string), one from a pointer and a length, one from a just a length (just allocates the character array), and one from a C string constant pointer (for holding error strings). There are also constructors that create a null or zero length string (length is zero, pointer is zero) and one from another string instance. There is a destructor that deallocates the character array if there is one (i.e. allocated, for which length is greater than zero). Finally there are access functions for returning the length and the character array pointer.