Tutorial on understanding strings in Symbian

Question

Hi! I have Carbide.c++ Developer from Nokia and I want to create applications for my S60 phone. I've looked at the samples that goes with the different SDK's for S60 but I haven't found any simple explanation on how strings, called descriptors, are used in Symbian.

One of the problems are that I'm visually impaired and therefore it takes quite some time to read through large documents that has page up and page down with lots of unuseful info and I've given up.

I'm willing to give it another try. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Here are a few sites on blogspot that may help. They have RSS feeds that will hopefully be easier to consume than paging through PDFs.

• http://descriptor-tips.blogspot.com/
• http://descriptors.blogspot.com/

Answer 2

Yeah, The strings in Symbian is nightmarish.. atleast when you start with..

Here are few good references to help:

• Introducing the RBuf Descriptor from Symbian Developer
• Comparing C strings and descriptors from Forum Nokia discussion
• Using Symbian OS String Descriptors from NewLC

Answer 3

The best advice regarding descriptors I give to any new Symbian developer in my company is to try and avoid using the descriptors when not necessary. The Symbian SDK has the libc API which includes stdio, stdlib, string and more. I usually use char* types and when necessary I convert it to a descriptor (when I need to send a string to an SDK method which requires it).

Answer 4

I'd second http://descriptors.blogspot.com/ This is invaluable for getting to grips with Descriptors.

Also, sites such as newlc.com have forums for Symbian C++ specific code problems.