Replacement for string-as-unibyte-function

[Joe Riel <jriel@maplesoft.com>]

Apologies for this partial duplicate; after posting realized I no longer
receive email from this group, so renewed.  Am copying and responding to response
from the website:

Eli Zaretskii asks:
> Please describe your use case: what are you trying to do that you
> needed string-as-unibyte?

Am handling a message passed in from an external process
(its passed in chunks).

The header of the message specifies its length, in bytes.
Some of the characters may be unicode.   Am using
buffer-substring-no-properties to later extract the message.
To get its length write, each byte has to be a character in the buffer.

It appears as though

   (encode-coding-string string 'utf-8-unix)

is the equivalent of (string-as-unibyte string).



-- 
Joe Riel