Re: Idea for string comparison aid

[dfeuer at techhouse dot brown dot edu (David Feuer)]

The first message I sent with this subject did nothing but display my
ignorance.  I hope this one will be more productive.  What I would like
to have is an incremental version of strxfrm.  This function would take
a string, a state object of some sort, and a number n, and return the
next n characters of the transformed string.  Forward passes should be
cheap, requiring little state.  Backward passes will be cheap in many
(most?) encodings, but will occasionally be expensive.  I suspect
(correct me please if I'm wrong) that in most applications, backward
passes will be reached only occasionally, so their larger space or time
demands are acceptable.

I would try to write this function myself, but I cannot seem to find
documentation for the internal workings of strxfrm, and have not yet
managed to interpret the source, though I have made some progress.

David