Convert symbols to strings

[Jonathan Malmaud]

Was there a design decision to not have something like

convert(::Type{UTF8String}, x::Symbol) = string(x)?

Seems like it would be convenient. 

[Stefan Karpinski]

No, I can't think of a reason not to do that.

[Kevin Squire]

Hi Jonathan, 

Just for curiosity, how would you be using this?  Not objecting, but I can't figure out where I would use it.

Kevin

[Jonathan Malmaud]

It just came up because I was trying to create a dataframe from a dictionary, where the keys in my dictionary were symbols containing the intended column names. The dataframe constructor apparently tries to use convert to get a string form of the keys it's passed, so it threw an error.

[Kevin Squire]

Okay, that makes perfect sense now. 

Cheers, Kevin

[Michel Lesoinne]

Has there been action on this? How can I get the string corresponding to a symbol?

[Tim Holy]

Does string(:x) do what you want, or are you thinking of something different?

--Tim

[Michel Lesoinne]

It does. Sorry for the noise, I had tried String(:x) and that fails.

[Tim Holy]

I asked it as a question because I've sometimes wondered if there's need for a
more efficient converter, something along the lines of what bytestring does
given a Ptr{Uint8}.

--Tim

[Steven G. Johnson]

If you convert(Ptr{Uint8}, :somesymbol), it is quite efficient -- it just gives you a pointer to the internal symbol representation in memory, without making a copy or converting to a string first.

[Tim Holy]

I hadn't noticed the convert(Ptr{Uint8}, :somesymbol) method, that's exactly
what I had in mind. Very nice.

--Tim