Problems with Symbian descriptor assignment

Question

Hi,

Once again I am struggeling with Symbians Descriptors...

char fileName[128] = "somethingsomething";

Next I have then en TEntry object which has a member iName. To this iName I would like to assign my fileName. I tried to do it as follows:

TEntry anEntry;

anEntry.iName.Copy((TText8* )rEntity->fileName);

-

no instance of overloaded function " TBufC::Copy [with S=256]" matches the argument list
        argument types are: (TText8 *)
        object type is: TBufC<256>
                    anEntry.iName.Copy((TText8* )rEntity->fileName);

Do I need to use another function to copy the filename into entry.iname?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Wrap the zero-terminated const char [] data in a TPtrC to make it a descriptor that can be passed to Copy. However, TEntry::iName is a constant TBufC but you can call Des on it to get a modifiable TPtr:

anEntry.iName.Des().Copy(TPtrC8((TText8 *)rEntity->fileName));

Answer 2

TBufC is non-modifiable (C is for "constant"). It doesn't have any Copy functions.

http://developer.symbian.com/main/documentation/sdl/symbian94/sdk/doc_source/reference/reference-cpp/E32_EKA2/TBufCClass.html

Try something like:

iName.Des().Copy(TPtrC8((TText8*)fileName));

or

TBuf<256> tmp;  // or HBuf if you're worried about using so much stack
tmp.Copy(TPtrC8((TText8*)filename));
iName = tmp;

If you can't change the type of iName, maybe you can change fileName to be stored in a descriptor instead of just a char array? As you've discovered, mixing the two is painful.

This all assumes that your 8-bit char is ascii or ISO-latin, not UTF-8. If the latter, you need to convert the character encoding as well.