Chromium String usage

Types of Strings

In the Chromium code base, we use std::string and std::u16string. Blink uses blink::String instead, which is patterned on std::string, but is a slightly different class (see the docs for their guidelines, we’ll only talk about Chromium here). We also have a StringPiece[16] class, which is basically a pointer to a string that is owned elsewhere with a length of how many characters from the other string form this “token”. Finally, there is also blink::WebString, which is used by the Blink glue layer.

String Encodings

We use a variety of encodings in the code base. UTF-8 is most common, but we also use ASCII and UTF-16.

• ASCII is the older 7-bit encoding which includes 0-9, a-z, A-Z, and a few common punctuation characters, but not much else. ASCII text (common in HTML, CCS, and JavaScript) uses one byte per character.
• UTF-8 is an encoding where characters are one or more bytes (up to 6) in length. Each byte indicates whether another byte follows. All ASCII characters are UTF-8 characters, so code that works correctly with UTF-8 will handle ASCII.
• UTF-16 is an encoding where all characters are at least two bytes long. There are also four-byte UTF-16 characters (a pair of two 16-bit code units, called a "surrogate pair"). Common cases of 4-byte characters include most Emoji as well as some Chinese characters.
• UTF-32 is an encoding where all characters are four bytes long.

When to use which encoding

The most important rule here is the meta-rule, code in the style of the surrounding code. In the frontend, we use std::string/char for UTF-8 and std::u16string16/char16_t for UTF-16 on all platforms. Even though std::string is encoding agnostic, we only put UTF-8 into it. std::wstring/wchar_t is rarely used in cross-platform code (in part because it's differently-sized on different platforms), but common in Windows-specific code to interface with native APIs (which often take wchar_t* or similar). Most UI strings are UTF-16. URLs are generally UTF-8. Strings in the webkit glue layer are typically UTF-16 with several exceptions. Chromium code does not use UTF-32.

The GURL class and strings

One common data type using strings is the GURL class. The constructor takes a std::string in UTF-8 for the URL itself. If you have a GURL, you can use the spec() method to get the std::string for the entire URL, or you can use component methods to get parsed parts, such as scheme(), host(), port(), path(), query(), and ref(), all of which return a std::string. All the parts of the GURL with the exception of the ref string will be pure ASCII. The ref string may have UTF-8 characters which are not also ASCII characters.

Guidelines for string use in our codebase

• Use std::string from the C++ standard library for normal use with strings
• Length checking - if checking for empty, prefer “string.empty():” to “string.length() == 0”
• When you make a string constant, use char[] (or char16_t[]) instead of a std::string:
  • const char kFoo[] = “foo”;
  • const char16_t kBar[] = u"bar";
  • This is part of our style guidelines. It also makes code faster because there are no destructors, and more maintainable because there are no shutdown order dependencies.
• There are many handy routines which operate on strings. You can use IntToString() if you want to do atoi(), and StringPrintf() if you need the full power of printf. You can use WriteInto() to make a C++ string writeable by a C API. StringPiece makes it easy and efficient to write functions that take both C++ and C style strings.
• For function input parameters, prefer to pass a string by const reference instead of making a new copy.
• For function output parameters, it is OK to either return a new string or pass a pointer to a string. Performance wise, there isn’t much difference.
• Often, efficiency is not paramount, but sometimes it is - when working in an inner loop, pay special attention to minimize the amount of string construction, and the number of temporary copies made.
  • When you use std::string, you can end up constructing lots of temporary string objects if you aren’t careful, or copying the string lots of times. Each copy makes a call to malloc, which needs a lock, and slows things down. Try to minimize how many temporaries get constructed.
  • When building a string, prefer “string1 += string2; string1 += string3;” to “string1 = string1 + string2 + string3;” Better still, use base::StrCat().
• For localization, we have the ICU library, with many useful helpers to do things like find word boundaries or convert to lowercase or uppercase correctly for the current locale.
• We try to avoid repeated conversions between string encoding formats, as converting them is not cheap. It's generally OK to convert once, but if we have code that toggles the encoding six times as a string goes through some pipeline, that should be fixed.