Add a structure to facilitate .as_str()/.as_bytes()

[matt2xu]

At the moment, Element has two methods as_bytes() and as_str() to allow access to raw bytes or conversion to UTF-8 strings. Also, Element has no way to access the all contents (from start to end) as either raw or str, only as String (which is incidentally why the writer cannot use write_wrapped_str for start elements). Attributes, on the other hand, iterates over raw keys with converted strings. Maybe we could introduce a "Text" structure or something similar, that:

• automatically converts to [u8](this is what the Deref trait allows if I understand correctly)
• as a as_str() method to do the explicit conversion
• then Attributes would iterate over (Text, Text), and Element could have two functions name() that returns a Text over the bytes from start to name_end, and content() that returns a Text over the bytes from start to end.

Not sure if Text is a good name, but you get the idea :-)

[tafia]

LGTM!

[matt2xu]

I tried that, but it turned out to be too verbose and complicated. I went a different route: use only [u8] for name() and content() methods, and use an AsStr trait that implements as_str() for [u8]. Not sure if the trait is worth to have or not. Let me know what you think: matt2xu@44a245b

[tafia]

I don't know how useful is the content method, I can only see the scenario where we want to copy the entire element, perhaps we can have Element deref to &[u8] so we can copy_from_slice directly on &Element. But I'm not sure it won't interfere with some other methods ...

[matt2xu]

The content method is useful to get the whole element, including attributes, for instance in the writer (there is no longer a different method for writing start elements) and for the Debug impl. Plus it seems more natural to get the content of a Text or Comment Event rather than their name, it makes the intent of the code clearer in my opinion.

[tafia]

I think content is ok.
Can you do a PR ?

[matt2xu]

Sure!

[tafia]

closed by #6

[tafia]

For people having compilation issue, #6 breaks existing code. To fix you'll need to:

• replace as_bytes with name
• replace as_str with content().as_str() or name().as_str() depending on your use case
• for attributes, you'll need to call as_str on values (which used to be a &str before Improve API for creating new elements #3)