Should Bytes.toString really use getString?

[Simn]

I know it has been like this for a while, but having an implicit conversion like this seems wrong to me. In the general case, the conversion does not lead to printable strings and printing is what toString is typically used for. There could be 0-chars in the middle which in the standard getString implementation truncate the string.

IMO the user should be explicit about such a conversion. A toString could act more like toHex instead.

[haxiomic]

Thanks for brining this up @Simn

Without knowing anything about the bytes API beforehand, I'd expect it to work something like

var bytes = new Bytes([0x48,0x65,0x6c,0x6c,0x6f,0x20,0x57,0x6f,0x72,0x6c,0x64,0x0a]);
trace(bytes); // Bytes([48 65 6c 6c 6f 20 57 6f 72 6c 64 0a])
trace(bytes.convertToString(UTF8Encoding)); // "Hello World"

Looking at the existing API, I think we need a lazier getString(), so you can just do bytes.getString()

[ncannasse]

Well, I understand that we might want to see the whole bytes with trace(bytes) and not only the string part. But I'm quite afraid with changing that now (even for 4.0) as it might silently break some code relying on current behavior. Maybe better off deprecating toString() entirely ?