[plt-scheme] String functions in Dr. Scheme

On Apr 28, 2007, at 4:11 PM, jmcaxolotl at gmail.com wrote:

> I have some experience with Common Lisp and emacs' elisp, but am new
> to Scheme.  I'm trying to fool around with some functions I wrote in
> elisp, that need to be able to map the characters in a string to their
> numerical places in the alphabet.  It's no great surprise that string
> handling is utterly different in Scheme than it is in elisp, but I'm
> not finding the docs on just what string-handling functions are
> defined in Dr. Scheme.  And of course, at what language level I have
> to be in order to get at them.
>
> Maybe I just need a pointer to the right doc page?  Which is a little
> surprising, because mostly the PLT web interface looks remarkably
> complete and well thought-out.

1) Just about all of the DrScheme documentation is available using  
Help Desk (in the Help menu), if you haven't already seen this.
2) These docs are also available (perhaps a bit harder to search)  
directly from the plt-scheme.org website.
3) My guess is that you'll probably be happiest using either the  
"Pretty Big" language (uses the top level) or the "Module" language  
(requires that your definitions take the form of a module.)
4) There's an extensive library of string functions (including  
unicode support), but you might also be interested in the "byte"  
operations; in particular, you may be happier dealing with utf-8 byte  
encodings than with unicode code points, particularly if you're  
hoping to go back & forth between chars & numbers in a vaguely ASCII- 
like way.

John Clements