I'm looking to convert an array of string to ReadOnlySpan<ReadOnlySpan<Char>> to optimize a split algorithm.
Is it possible? How?
string[] separators;
ReadOnlyChar<char> totalChars = stackalloc char[separators.Sum(s => s.Length)];
// Copy each string in continu
ReadOnlySpan<ReadOnlySpan<Char>> spanSeparators = stackalloc ReadOnlySpan<ReadOnlySpan<Char>>[separator.Length];
// Slice each string into
No. A span (or a ref-struct more generally) cannot be used as a generic type argument, and since the T in Span<T> is a generic type argument: this cannot work.
If the origin here is a string, you could do something involving Span<ReadOnlyMemory<char>>, though, using string.AsMemory (from MemoryExtensions). However, I wonder if a better approach is to create a custom iterator instead, i.e. don't actually precompute or store anything, and just do the work to find the next item (from the current state) in the MoveNext(). Since foreach works via duck-typing, it should work against a ref-struct iterator, allowing you to store a "working" span in a field.