Every now and then I need to write some string processing code in
C, because the Python (or awk/sed/etc, or even perl) alternatives
just aren't running fast enough. However, life is too short to write
raw string manipulation code in C. What I want to do is to write
Python-in-C, using some library to handle all of the low-level string
manipulation so that I just write high-level stuff.

The library I like for this is
[[bstring http://bstring.sourceforge.net/]] (also
[[here http://sourceforge.net/projects/bstring/]]).

{{CutShort}}

There are other C string manipulation libraries, but none that I turned
up the last time I looked have interfaces as nice as bstring's. And
bstring works, although it does have a few idiosyncrasies.

In the process of giving bstring a workout, I wrote a number of
programs and some additional support routines. You can find the
full package [[here </~cks/programs/bstring-ex/>]]. (Hopefully
they have enough comments et al to be followable.)

Note: I see that the bstring base version that I developed against
is a little bit out of date. I haven't had time yet to update my
programs to make use of the latest additions, so there may be
some functional duplication there.