Re: Replacement for string-as-unibyte function

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2021 15:02:27 -0800
> From: Joe Riel <joer@san.rr.com>
> 
> 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.

Then the text you get is already unibyte, and I see no reason to use
string-as-unibyte.  Just read the text into a unibyte buffer and
process it there, then _decode_ everything when you want to present it
or process it as human-readable text.

IOW, I don't see why you'd need string-as-unibyte in this scenario.